Nobel Prize in Literature controversies

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While some of their prize decisions were well received at the time, the Swedish Academy's handling of the Nobel prize in its early history has been heavily criticized. Nobel committee chairman Carl David af Wirsén was known to fiercely oppose that authors he disliked, such as Henrik Ibsen and Selma Lagerlöf, be awarded the prize. The choice of the insignificant German philosopher Rudolf Christoph Eucken as a compromise winner of the prize in 1908 was heavily criticized at the time, and has been described as one of the worst mistakes in the history of the Nobel Prize in Literature.^[8][9]

Knut Hamsun sent his Nobel medal to German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels as a gift, after a meeting they had in 1943.^[10]

In 1926, George Bernard Shaw first declined the 1925 Nobel Prize (which was awarded a year later) stating "I can forgive Nobel for inventing dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel prize". He later changed his mind and accepted the honour, but refused to receive the prize money.^{[11][verification needed][12]} Shaw recommended that the prize money instead be used to fund the translation of works by Swedish playwright August Strindberg to English.^[12]

Following the international success of the novel Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak was awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature, which angered the Soviet Union authorities. Pasternak first accepted the prize, but was forced by the authorities to decline it. After Doctor Zhivago was finally published in Russian in 1988, Pasternak's son accepted the prize on his father's behalf.^[13]

Jean-Paul Sartre declined the Nobel Prize in Literature, claiming that he refused official distinctions and did not want to be institutionalised and for fear that it would limit the impact of his writing.^[14] While Sartre's statement to the Swedish press was polite, he revealed in the 1976 documentary film Sartre par lui-même (Sartre by Himself) quite opposite reasons for rejecting the Nobel Prize, stating: "Because I was politically involved, the bourgeois establishment wanted to cover up my past errors. Now there's an admission! And so they gave me the Nobel Prize. They pardoned me and said I deserved it. It was monstrous!"^[15]

The 1970 prize was awarded to Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who did not attend the ceremony in Stockholm for fear that the Soviet Union would prevent his return. His works there were available only in samizdat-published, clandestine form. After the Swedish government refused to hold a public award ceremony and lecture at its Moscow embassy, Solzhenitsyn refused the award altogether, commenting that the conditions set by the Swedes (who preferred a private ceremony) were "an insult to the Nobel Prize itself". Solzhenitsyn later accepted the award on 10 December 1974, after the Soviet Union banished him.^[16] Critics suggest that Solzhenitsyn was awarded the prize because of his political stance, not his writing.^[17]

The 1974 prize was awarded to the Swedish authors Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson: both themselves members of the Swedish Academy and little known outside their home country. Graham Greene, Jorge Luis Borges, Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov were favourites to win the award that year.^[18] Bellow won in 1976; neither Greene, Borges nor Nabokov were awarded the prize.^[19]

The 1997 prize went to Italian actor-playwright Dario Fo, who was initially considered "rather lightweight" by some critics, as he was seen primarily as a performer and had previously been censured by the Roman Catholic Church.^[20] Salman Rushdie and Arthur Miller had been favoured to receive the prize, but a committee member was later quoted as saying that they would have been "too predictable, too popular".^[21]

The 2004 prize was awarded to Elfriede Jelinek. Academy member Knut Ahnlund, who had been inactive since 1996, resigned, alleging that selecting Jelinek had caused "irreparable damage" to the prize's reputation.^[22][23]

The 2005 prize went to Harold Pinter, "who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms". The award was delayed for some days, apparently due to Knut Ahnlund's resignation. In turn, this renewed speculation about a "political element" existing in the Swedish Academy's awarding of the Prize.^[24] Although poor health prevented him from giving his controversial Nobel Lecture, "Art, Truth and Politics", in person, Pinter appeared on video, which was simultaneously transmitted on Britain's Channel Four.^[25] The issue of "political stance" was also raised in response to Orhan Pamuk and Doris Lessing, prizewinners in 2006 and 2007, respectively.^[26]

The 2009 prize awarded to Herta Müller was criticized because many U.S. literary critics and professors had never heard of Müller before.^[27] This reignited criticism that the committee was too Eurocentric.^[28][29]

In 2010, the prize was awarded to the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa. Some people, including the poet Antonio Cisneros, stated that he would have been awarded the prize earlier if not for his political views.^[30]

The 2012 prize awarded to the Chinese author Mo Yan caused controversy. Several Chinese dissidents criticized Mo Yan, saying he voiced support for the Chinese government's system of censorship in his Nobel lecture.^[31]

The 2016 prize awarded to Bob Dylan was controversial, since it marked the first time that a songwriter-musician had been awarded the prize. Many writers and commentators, mostly novelists, objected, feeling it cheapened the prize. Scottish novelist Irvine Welsh stated "I'm a Dylan fan, but this is an ill-conceived nostalgia award wrenched from the rancid prostates of senile, gibbering hippies",^[32] while Lebanese novelist Rabih Alameddine argued that "Bob Dylan winning a Nobel in Literature is like Mrs Fields being awarded 3 Michelin stars."^[33] However, others noted that poetry has long been recognized by the committee and speculated that the popularity of Dylan's work was the true motive behind those objecting. Songwriter Leonard Cohen said that awarding Dylan the prize was "like pinning a medal on Mount Everest for being the highest mountain".^[34]

In a live webchat hosted by The Guardian, Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgård said that "I'm very divided. I love that the Nobel committee opens up for other kinds of literature – lyrics and so on. I think that's brilliant. But knowing that Dylan is the same generation as Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, makes it very difficult for me to accept it."^[35] An article in Slate magazine found multiple parts of Dylan's Nobel lecture that closely resembled the analysis of Moby-Dick on the study guide website SparkNotes. According to an Associated Press analysis, the two texts contained more than 20 "identical phrases and similar phrasing", but "no verbatim sentences".^[36][37][38] The New York Times wrote that plagiarism allegations were "nothing new" for Dylan, who had defended borrowing material as "a rich and enriching tradition" in folk music.^[39]

The 2019 prize awarded to Austrian novelist and playwright Peter Handke came under heavy criticism due to his history of denying the Bosnian genocide and his vocal support for late Serbian President Slobodan Milošević, even speaking at his funeral in 2006.^[40][41] Authors Miha Mazzini, Hari Kunzru, Jonathan Littell, Slavoj Žižek, and Salman Rushdie^[41][42][43] each heavily criticized the choice, and it was further condemned by PEN International,^[43] as well as Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt, who said that the award gave his views a platform that "he does not deserve and the public does not need him to have".^[44] The governments of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Turkey issued condemnations against the award, and the ambassadors from Albania, Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, North Macedonia, and Turkey boycotted the award ceremony.^[43][45][46] Hundreds of people protested outside the award ceremony,^[46] and a petition to revoke the award received close to 60,000 signatures.^[40]

The heavy focus on European authors, and Swedes in particular, is the subject of mounting criticism, including from major Swedish newspapers.^[47] The majority of the laureates for the Nobel Prize in Literature have been European. Swedes in particular have received more prizes in this category than all of Asia. In 2008, Horace Engdahl, then the permanent secretary of the academy, declared that "Europe still is the center of the literary world" and said that American writers did not win often (the most recent at the time was Toni Morrison, 15 years prior) because "the US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature." David Remnick replied, "You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Vladimir Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures." Remnick cited Philip Roth, John Updike and Don DeLillo as counterexamples to Engdahl's claim, along with "many younger writers, some of them sons and daughters of immigrants writing in their adopted English."^[48]

Adam Kirsch wrote: "When Saul Bellow learned that he had won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1976, he reacted to the news in the only way a great writer can or should: He tried hard not to care. 'I'm glad to get it,' Bellow admitted, but 'I could live without it.' This month, as the Swedish Academy prepares for its annual announcement, Bellow's heirs in the top ranks of American literature—Roth, Updike, Pynchon, DeLillo—already know they're going to live without the Nobel Prize."^[49] In 2009, Engdahl's replacement, Peter Englund, rejected his sentiment ("In most language areas ... there are authors that really deserve and could get the Nobel Prize and that goes for the United States and the Americas, as well"), and acknowledged the Eurocentric bias of the selections, saying that, "I think that is a problem. We tend to relate more easily to literature written in Europe and in the European tradition."^[50]

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The Nobel Prize in Literature has a history of controversial omissions. Joseph Epstein noted: "You may not know it, but you and I are members of a club whose fellow members include Leo Tolstoy, Henry James, Anton Chekhov, Mark Twain, Henrik Ibsen, Marcel Proust, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Thomas Hardy, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov. The club is the Non-Winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature. All these authentically great writers, still alive when the prize, initiated in 1901, was being awarded, didn't win it." This led him to speculate that "Criteria other than high art seem to be involved."^[51] Other major authors have been ignored, including Joseph Kessel, André Malraux,^[52] W. H. Auden, Graham Greene and Virginia Woolf.

There are omissions which are beyond the control of the Nobel Committee such as the early death of an author as was the case with Marcel Proust, Italo Calvino, and Roberto Bolaño. According to Kjell Espmark, "the main works of Kafka, Cavafy, and Pessoa were not published until after their deaths, and the true dimensions of Mandelstam's poetry were revealed above all in the unpublished poems that his wife saved from extinction and gave to the world long after he had perished in his Siberian exile."^[53]

British novelist Tim Parks ascribed the never-ending controversy surrounding the decisions of the Nobel Committee to the "essential silliness of the prize and our own foolishness at taking it seriously"^[54] and noted that "eighteen (or sixteen) Swedish nationals will have a certain credibility when weighing up works of Swedish literature, but what group could ever really get its mind round the infinitely varied work of scores of different traditions. And why should we ask them to do that?"^[54]

Although several Scandinavians were awarded, two of the most celebrated writers, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen and Swedish author August Strindberg, were repeatedly bypassed by the committee, but Strindberg holds the singular distinction of being awarded an Anti-Nobel Prize, conferred by popular acclaim and national subscription and presented to him in 1912 by future prime minister Hjalmar Branting.^[55][56][57]

Paul Valéry was nominated twelve times between 1930 and 1945 but died just as the academy intended to award him the prize in 1945.^[58][59] James Joyce wrote the books that rank 1st and 3rd on the Modern Library 100 Best Novels – Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – but Joyce was never nominated for the prize. Kjell Espmark, a member of the Nobel Prize committee and author of the history of the prize, claimed that Joyce's "stature was not properly recognized even in the English-speaking world," but that Joyce doubtless would have been awarded if he had lived in the late 1940s when the academy began to award literary pioneers like T. S. Eliot.^[60]

Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges was nominated for the prize several times, but the academy did not award it to him, though he was among the final candidates some years in the 1960s.^[61] Edwin Williamson, Borges' biographer, stated that the author's support of Argentine and Chilean right-wing military dictators may have been a factor.^[62] Graham Greene was nominated for the prize thirty-one times between 1950 and 1973.^[63] Greene was a celebrated candidate to be awarded the prize in the 1960s and 1970s, and the academy was criticised for passing him over.^[4] W. H. Auden was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nineteen times between 1961 and 1971,^[64] and was among the final candidates for the prize several times, but the academy favoured other writers. In 1964 Auden and Jean-Paul Sartre were the leading candidates, and the academy favoured Sartre as Auden's best work was thought "too far back in time." In 1967 Auden was one of three final candidates along with Graham Greene and the awarded Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias.^[65][66]

Czech writer Karel Čapek's War With the Newts was considered too offensive^[when?] to the German government, and he declined to suggest a non-controversial publication that could be cited in its stead ("Thank you for the good will, but I have already written my doctoral dissertation").^[67] He never received a prize. French novelist and intellectual André Malraux was considered for the Literature prize in the 1950s, according to Swedish Academy archives studied by the newspaper Le Monde on their opening in 2008. Malraux was competing with Albert Camus, but was rejected several times, especially in 1954 and 1955, "so long as he does not come back to the novel", while Camus won the prize in 1957.^[52] The academy's refusal to express support for Salman Rushdie in 1989, after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwā calling for his death, led two Academy members to resign.^[68][69]

Leo Tolstoy was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature every year from 1902 to 1906 but never won, and in 1901 he was not even nominated, resulting in a major controversy.^[70][71] The 1901 prize went instead to French poet Sully Prudhomme, and the year after to German historian Theodor Mommsen. Reports suggest that Tolstoy did not receive the prize because of the jury's reservations towards his political and religious positions as well as Sweden's historical enmity towards Russia.^[72][73][74] In 1901, 42 Swedish writers, including August Strindberg, wrote Tolstoy a letter following the announcement, expressing their dissatisfaction with the decision.^[71][75]