Who will be the next American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature?

Not about what I want lol. What I'm saying is the Nobel committee are already kind of doing it. They usually give the prize to writers who have a really long track record and are in that kind of literary conversation. And as I said much of their work would've been available in English already. Caveats are that some of the work might be out of print or not yet translated into English.

Maybe the Swedes also access a lot of German translations too but I can't recall anyone looking at the winner and going 'there is no book by this person in English' today.

getting ready for my yearly argument with someone over whether they award the Nobel Prize in Literature for a specific book

Like people are so adamant that Beloved won the Nobel Prize

I'd like to win the Nobel prize for literature.

Slavoj Zizek almost makes me applaud the choice: “In 2014, Handke called for the Nobel to be abolished, saying it was a ‘false canonisation’ of literature. The fact that he got it now proves that he was right. This is Sweden today: an apologist of war crimes gets a Nobel prize while the country fully participated in the character assassination of the true hero of our times, Julian Assange. Our reaction should be: not the literature Nobel prize for Handke but the Nobel peace prize for Assange.”

I like Handke's A Short Letter, Long Farewell a lot but haven't wanted to explore the rest.

Lots of good stuff from him back in the day, The Weight of the World, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, Afternoon of a Writer, but yeah.

great writer

and an even better friend (to slobodan milosevic)

could be a poll: is it cool to give awards to people who have gourmet hot-takes about ethnic cleansing?

The thing is, hasn't he written about that stuff? Isn't it a part of his work?

I shouldn't say anything, I'm reading the Cantos at the moment. Forty impressive and smart poems, and then it ends up being about 'usura' and that it's all the fault of the jews.

Yeah thought he did but that was after I stopped reading

I shouldn't say anything, I'm reading the Cantos at the moment. Forty impressive and smart poems, and then it ends up being about 'usura' and that it's all the fault of the jews.

― Frederik B,

and Martin Van Buren as a character!

And Alexander Hamilton! And I'm sorry, but I'm with Lin-Manuel on this on.

https://pen.org/press-release/statement-nobel-prize-for-literature-2019/?fbclid=IwAR0A6dk7_PsdpY8KlYkAfecVYWW4wETqAjjMyGSIF8nuaNDWbltsF69Rf3s

Holy shit. It's on!

https://live.staticflickr.com/3702/9986624746_c24f8fc0ab_b.jpg

You just have to 🙄 @ those statements above. It's just a total misunderstanding at what the Nobel does and who it rewards. They are not interested in following a line on the politics of literature and they've no incentive to do so. If they did it's unlikely it would have the status it does. No. It has to bring all sides to the table, so it will elevate some marginalised voices now and then.

I wonder if Olga Tokarczuk might reject the award at some point...

The description of the Nobel literally says it's to award an 'idealisk riktning', that is, it's meant to award art in an idealistic direction. Genocide deniers don't really fit that bill. Then again, it was the ones in the Academy who defended the rapist who stayed, so they do like male criminals.

Also, fuck no is Peter Handke marginalised. He literally chose the perpetrators over the victims, and has been praised to the heavens in Serbia for doing so.

Olga Tokarczuk had to have protection because she spoke out about the darker parts of Polish history. Handke was allowed to speak at a state funeral for a war criminal. It's so obscene people think he's the marginalised one, complete moral idiocy.

Idealistic direction is just why we are here. They will point to the body of work (the Nobel is not really given for a specific book).

Lol I am not calling Handke marginalised. I'm saying it will award a writer of colour or a woman, now and then.

What Olga has said so far:

Olga Tokarczuk on winning the Nobel Prize (1/2): "I believe in a literature that unites people and shows us how very similar we are, that makes us aware of the fact that we're all joined together by invisible threads. That tells the story

— Jennifer Croft (@jenniferlcroft) October 11, 2019

I wouldn't care about the prize so much except it came with £740,000.

one year short of the centennial of knut hamsun's nobel prize for literature!

Does anyone have a link to what he actually said about the Srebrenica massacre?

what would be awesome is if bob dylan returned his nobel prize for literature (which i believe was awarded to him in recognition of "christmas in the heart") in protest

hmm - some details here:

https://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/18/world/german-writer-sets-off-storm-on-serbia.html

jmm sorry autocorrect strikes again

More here:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n10/leland-de-la-durantaye/taking-refuge-in-the-loo

Thanks. Also some details here: https://theintercept.com/2019/10/10/congratulations-nobel-committee-you-just-gave-the-literature-prize-to-a-genocide-apologist/

When writing about Srebrenica, where several thousand Muslims were executed by Serb forces after they captured the enclave, he allows that what happened there was the most “abominable” massacre in the war, but he swiftly pivots to saying that we should also “listen to the survivors of Muslim massacres in numerous Serb villages around Srebrencia.” This is the same “all sides do it” canard, which equates the extremely few with the very many, and fails to acknowledge that this war was started by Serbs and Milosevic in particular.

Yeah no one is saying Handke isn't a cunt.

I was asking because some articles (e.g. BBC) made it sound like he had denied that the massacre ever even happened. His comments in the Libération piece sound more like the standard apologist line.

one year short of the centennial of knut hamsun's nobel prize for literature!

Yup, he won in 1920. But seeing how the Beer Hall Putsch wasn't until 1923, it would have been difficult for the prize committee to foresee Hamsun's embrace of the Nazis. In contrast, Handke tipped his hand a while back.

The inevitable defence of Handke

https://thegoaliesanxiety.wordpress.com/2019/10/11/nobel-prize-for-peter-handke/

it's sully prudhomme i feel bad for

I like that text because it links Peter Handke's literary project with his political idiocy, thereby showing why it should discredit him from receiving a Nobel. But I know it's not what it tries to do. I just don't get why anyone can write with a straight face: Peter Handke has spent a lifetime attacking the kinds of ideological absolutisms that produce nationalism, hate, and war. He spoke at Slobodan Milosevic's funeral? Like, seriously, come on everyone. We don't have to be gaslit by obvious dishonesty.

http://littleatoms.com/was-peter-handke-revisionism-lost-translation

This piece backs up my point that the Nobel prize judges read in English as well as Swedish. That explains both Olga Tokarczuk and Handke.

It's an odd explanation for Handke though. Surely they would've known or gotten informed about his later work. But what seems true is they don't care enough about it.

I suspect the Academy, which is like 75% men over 75 (seriously, it's 12 men and 2 woman as far as I can tell, most women resigned or was forced out because they didn't want to defend rapists) is able to read German as well. Probably French too. It's true that questions of translation definitely impact the prize, I think with Mo Yan there was a controversy that the translator was a good friend of several members. He wasn't the rapist who used Academy apartments to rape interns, that was the husband / friend of another crew. Seriously, the whole thing should be abolished.

I couldn't let this go so I read the first third of Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia today, and it's just completely idiotic... And Handke explicitly says that he is following his usual artistic program in writing it. And it's just pointless, petty shit about who wrote what in Le Monde, and analysis on why Muslim victims are photographed in close-up, while Serbian victims are photographed in profile. It's shit.

I got an idea, though, which is that they really should separate artist and art, and give the ten million to a foundation that would then be invested in the oeuvre, to be used on translations, research, stipends, etc. I would honestly support that type of award being given to the work of Handke, because I find it essential to figure out how the fuck his apparently really impressive avantgarde ideas from the seventies turned into pro-Serbian shit.

because I find it essential to figure out how the fuck his apparently really impressive avantgarde ideas from the seventies turned into pro-Serbian shit.

― Frederik B

we should give ten million euros to a foundation to figure out how a Very Smart White Man turned into a defender of genocide?

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/12/dont-buy-the-champagne-booker-prize-winner-targeted-by-phone-hoax

lmao

we should give ten million euros to a foundation to figure out how a Very Smart White Man turned into a defender of genocide?

― Spironolactone T. Agnew (rushomancy), 12. oktober 2019 21:17 (twelve minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

That and on a stipend for me to write Danish subtitles for Die Linkshändige Frau

Shit. Sara Danius, who was essentially forced out of the Academy because she was too anti-rape, has died. They are really having a week.

Died?? She wasn't old or anything, was she? And she wrote a respected standard academic book about modernism and the senses or something - years before giving Dylan the prize.

she was 57, which is younger than me hence not old at all :(

the wikipedia write-up (which is all i know about this) somewhat complicates fred's summary of her role (tho of course fred may well be correct and wikipedia quite wrong): The three members resigned in protest over the decision by Sara Danius, the board secretary, not to take what they felt was appropriate legal action against Arnault.

(sorry the blue lines bit shd be in quotes, it's from wikipedia not my judgment)

Yeah, but she was then forced out by the even more pro-rape faction afterwards. While she had cancer. Then shithole Horace Engdahl bragged about how powerful he was, and speculated women just wasn't cut out for this kinda thing.

This is the essential part of the NYT article that that wiki-thing leads to: On the other side are two former permanent secretaries, Sture Allen and Horace Engdahl, who have made lacerating statements in recent days, calling the reaction to the allegations overblown and denouncing Ms. Danius as a weak leader. The 'allegations' lead to a conviction and a sentence of two years, for rape committed in an apartment owned by the academy.

Do you think she was right not to take legal action against Arnault?

(I've run out of free access to the NYT for this month so I can't check up what it says about that)

I don't really think it was her choice. But it's impossible to say, the institution is so secretive.

I can't imagine very many people are happy about the composition of the Academy these days. Based on what Fred's saying it doesn't seem like taking a year off did them any good at all. What are the options here? Who are the Academy responsible to?