Pending the announcement of the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature: prognosis, controversy and context

A photo of Alfred Nobel's medal in the conference room where members of the Swedish Academy announce the winners JONATHAN NACKSTRAND / AFP

Text by: Tirthankar Chanda Follow

7 min

Pending the award of the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature, speculation is rife on the name of the possible winner.

Will the Swedish jury's choice be less controversial this year than that of American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan in 2016 or the controversial Austrian writer Peter Handke last year?

Nothing is less sure.

Publicity

Read more

It is in the midst of a pandemic that the 2020 Nobel Prize season opened this year.

If the traditional calendar of proclamation of the names of the laureates throughout the second week of October has been maintained, it has been known for several months now that, distancing obliges, the physical award ceremony on December 10, followed by the dinner of Nobel gala, has been canceled.

The winners of the six honored fields (medicine, physics, chemistry, literature, peace and economics) will receive their prizes in their country of residence.

It's a first.

What does not change, however, is the media interest aroused by the Nobel Prize for Literature, the recipient of which will be known on Thursday, October 8.

For several months, speculations on the name of the possible winners have been rife.

It must be said that the Nobel in literature is the most prestigious literary prize in the world and whoever wins it is sure to see his name shine for a long time in the firmament of world letters.

For the Swedish Academy which awards the prize, it is a question of respecting the wish of

, Swedish industrialist and creator of the award, who wrote in his will dated 1895 that the recipient should be " 

 '.

Tolstoy, Joyce, Proust, Roth, the great forgotten of the Nobel

Philip Roth in New York on September 15, 2010. REUTERS / Eric Thayer / File Photo

For literature as for other disciplines, prizes have been awarded since 1901, with interruptions occurring only during the two world wars.

In all, 116 Nobel Prizes for Literature have been awarded since the start.

In the prize list by languages, the English language is in the lead with a total of 29 winners, while France is champion all genres included, with 15 winners.

The very first recipient of the distinction was the French poet Sully Prudhomme, now forgotten.

It is said that the Frenchman was in competition with his compatriot Émile Zola and the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy who thus joined the list of the great forgotten of the Nobel Prize.

The Irishman James Joyce, the Frenchman Marcel Proust and more recently the American

, the author of

, are also among the historical forgotten of the Nobel.

The Nobel Academy is also criticized for having very few women in its literary list, only 13%, and very few non-Western authors.

It was not until 1986 that an African writer was rewarded in the person of the Nigerian Wole Soyinka.

The Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz was the first Arab writer to be awarded the prize ... in 1988. The new perpetual secretary of the Swedish Academy, Mats Malm, elected in April 2019, has promised to repair these oversights by opening the Nobel Prize for literature more broadly to women and non-European authors.

The Swedish Academy has also been profoundly reorganized following a sex scandal that recently shook the institution to the point that it was forced to postpone the awarding of the 2018 prize, finally awarded at the same time as that of 2019. The turmoil caused by this scandal which exploded in Sweden in the wake of the #

revelations

, concerned several academics and led to chain resignations, including that of Sara Danius, the former perpetual secretary.

This sordid story that had kept the peaceful Kingdom of Sweden on alert for several months revealed cases of sexual exploitation, insider trading and pecuniary embezzlement involving the respected cultural elite who ran the activities of the Swedish Academy.

Despite the arrival of new decision-makers, the 2019 edition of the Nobel Prize for Literature was not without controversy.

The awarding of the prize to Austrian

who had drawn attention to his unconventional pro-Serbian positions during the war in Yugoslavia, showed that perhaps all was not settled among the academics of Stockholm.

Also, the 2020 edition is scrutinized with attention by the media.

Writer Peder Handke, November 17, 2018 in Vienna.

AFP

Who is afraid of Michel Houllebecq

Who will pocket the Nobel Prize for Literature this year, as well as the famous gold medal, the diploma and the sum of 9 million Swedish kronor, or approximately 865,000 euros, who go with it?

The question is on everyone's lips.

Literary salons across the world are buzzing with a thousand rumors, but any prognosis turns out to be complicated due to the secret nature of the deliberations and the lack of a nominative list of candidates.

However, names are circulating.

Those of the American novelist of Antiguan origin Jamaica Kincaid and of Maryse Condé, the great lady of the French West Indies, known for her masterful work devoted to the effects of colonialism, slavery and racism, are repeatedly cited in the media.

Jamaica Kincaid, whose real name is Elaine Potter Richardson, made a name for herself by publishing chronicles, short stories and novels with autobiographical accents, featuring the postcolonial plunder of Antigua, the island where she is from, but also family tensions in times of famine, poverty and disruptions.

The press also put forward the name of the Canadian poet Anne Carson, who is found in the forecasts alongside the Kenyan

the Albanian Ismaïl Kadaré, the American Joyce Carol Oates and Margaret Atwood.

These names have been circulating for many years and are cited with varying degrees of emphasis before the Nobel Prize expires each year.

Africa lovers hope that the continent will be in the spotlight again this year, 18 years after

who was the last African to win the prize.

In the context of the literary explosion that Africa has experienced in recent years, the attribution of this world prize to an African author would go in the direction of opening up this distinction to the “ 

  ” evoked by Mats Malm, the new price boss.

Unless those who had imposed in 2019 the appointment of pro-Serbian Peter Handke manage to snatch, within a Nobel jury divided into clans, the appointment of the very conservative French novelist

.

The author of

(2015) and

(2001) has been popular with bookmakers,

dissecting malaise in Western civilization

.

Newsletter

Receive all the international news directly in your mailbox

I subscribe

Follow all the international news by downloading the RFI application

google-play-badge_FR

• Literature

• Nobel prize

• Literary awards

• Culture

On the same subject

2015 Nobel Laureate Alexievich left Belarus for medical treatment

Nobel 2020 week opens in Sweden amid the Covid-19 pandemic

Ethiopia / Eritrea

Abiy Ahmed Nobel Peace Prize winner: "bitter disappointment" of the Eritrean diaspora