Imran Abdullah

The Swedish Academy is expected to announce two Nobel Prize winners on Thursday. The panel that selects the winners seeks to overcome the negative effects of 2018 on its image, as accusations of sexual misconduct and conflict of interest led to the resignation of a number of members of the Academy Council and withholding the award for lack of quorum.

Andres Olson, chairman of the Nobel Prize Committee for Literature, said the prize this year would be more diverse and gender-sensitive, avoiding the previously "centralized Europe".

Although Olson said the criteria for the award have changed to become more extensive, some critics have seen the "non-literary" criteria as underestimating the literary value of the award and taking into account "unprofessional" calculations.

"The award is widely seen as a political prize, the Nobel Peace Prize disguised in a literary mask," says American academic Bruton Feldman in his critical book The Nobel Prize: A History of Genius, Argument, and Luck.

Non-literary biases
Feldman and other critics of the award believe that panelists who choose Nobel literature winners are biased against authors with different political tastes. The recent statement by the Chairman of the Committee on the expansion of standards suggests tacit acceptance of some criticism.

The permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Horace Engdell announced in 2009 that "Europe remains the center of the literary world," and that "the United States is very isolated, not translated sufficiently, and does not really participate in the great dialogue of literature."

In this context, British novelist and academic Tim Parks doubted that Swedish committee members would often be able to taste Indonesian poetry or African literature, criticizing in an earlier article in the New York Book Show that members of the academy were able to identify the greatest novelists and poets on Referring to their bias towards Scandinavian culture, 16 Scandinavian writers have won the World Prize out of 113 since its launch until 2016.

Feldman, Parkes and other critics of the award have a long history of political and non-literary biases for the World Prize. Leading writers such as Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, controversial Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen and American satirical novelist Mark Twain were not awarded the prize, which in return was awarded to writers who are not readable in today's world.

The first Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded in 1901 to French poet Souley Brodome, whom the donor committee said honored him for his poetic composition, which provides evidence of "sublime idealism, artistic perfection and a rare mental and heart combination." In contrast, various literary circles at the time thought that Tolstoy (despite his unrealistic idealism) was more worthy of the first Nobel Prize for Literature.

Politics or literature?
Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges has been nominated for the award several times, but the academy, according to his biographer Edwin Williamson, probably did not give it to him because of his support for some right-wing military dictators in Argentina and Chile, including Augusto Pinochet.

Borges's failure to win the Nobel Prize in support of these right-wing dictators highlighted the paradox of the Committee's recognition of writers who publicly supported controversial "leftist dictatorships." Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, known for his support of the Cuban revolution and its leader Castro, won the award in 1982. Chilean Pablo Neruda, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, also admires Castro and is fond of the Soviet Union and its leader, Joseph Stalin. He received the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953, the same year the Union leader died, and wrote a poem in Praise, as described Vladimir Lenin as "a great genius in this century."

During World War I, the Swedish Commission adopted a policy of neutrality in favor of writers from countries not participating in the war, according to the critics of the award.

Elite or peoples award?
The Swedish Academy has bypassed the renowned Swedish playwright and novelist August Strindberg several times and Nobel was not given his liberal socialist inclinations, and his stinging satire for the upper classes of Swedish society.

Although Strindberg lost the prize in 1909 to the Swedish writer Selma Lagervil, who was the first woman to receive a Nobel literature prize, many solidarity with him and organized popular donations that raised some 45,000 Swedish crowns and was awarded by more than 20,000 donors - most of them Workers - under the name of the People's Prize as an alternative honor.

Spanish playwright Angel Guimera, who has written his literary works in Catalan 23 times, has been nominated for the prize, but has not won it most likely because of political pressure from Spain's central government.

The award was won by several exiled writers or dissidents banned from publishing in their countries, such as the exiled and anti-tyrannical Guatemalan writer Miguel Angel Asturias, who won the prize in 1967. The Soviet writer and poet Boris Pasternak won the prize in 1958 for his critic of the Communist regime, Dr. Zivako. After being smuggled and published outside the Soviet Union, he refused to receive the Nobel Prize after being pressured by the Soviet Communist Party to reject it.

Although some non-literary considerations such as standing up to dictatorships and solidarity with exiled writers may be appreciated by intellectuals and writers around the world who see responsibility for the role of the intellectual in political and social reform, at the same time they raise controversy over their right and priority, while another segment of writers and critics consider literature Aesthetic and human art should not be assessed by moral and militant standards. Thus, the literary and philosophical debate about the role and purpose of literature is reflected in the debate about the World Prize and its supposed biases.