Yet Another Great Writer Who Never Received a Nobel
I don’t have too much good to say about the Swedish Academy, which decides who will receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. If you look at the list of its recipients, it would not take too much effort to produce a list of as great as or even greater literary figures who have not received the laureate. Let me take a stab at it:
Kobo Abe (Japan), Woman in the Dunes
Chinua Achebe (Nigeria), Things Fall Apart
Ryunosuke Akutagawa (Japan), Rashomon
Jorge Amado (Brazil), Gabriela: Clove and Cinnamon
W. H. Auden (UK), Poetry
Georges Bernanos (France), Mouchette
Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina), Ficciones
Joseph Conrad (UK/Poland), Nostromo
Richard Flanagan (Australia), The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Graham Greene (UK), The Heart of the Matter
Vassili Grossman (Russia), Life and Fate
Henry James (US/UK), The Ambassadors
James Joyce (Ireland), Ulysses
Yashar Kemal (Turkey), Memed, My Hawk
Gyula Krúdy (Hungary), The Red Post Coach
Stanislaw Lem (Poland), Solaris
Osip Mandelstam (Russia), Poetry
Vladimir Nabokov (US/Russia), Lolita
Fernando Pessoa (Portugal), The Book of Disquiet
Marcel Proust (France), In Search of Lost Time
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (Russia), Roadside Picnic
Italo Svevo (Slovenia), Confessions of Zeno
Leo Tolstoy (Russia), Novels and Stories
Mark Twain (US), Novels and Stories
Evelyn Waugh (UK), Brideshead Revisited
Virginia Woolf (UK), Mrs Dalloway
As you can see, I have not overloaded the list with the names of American authors, in the interests of being fair. If I wanted to, I can add names like Philip Roth, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip K. Dick, Cormac McCarthy, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and a few others.
These can replace such figures as the following, whose reputations have not kept up with the times: Bjornsterne Bjornson, José Echegaray, Giosue Carducci, Rudolf Christoph Eucken, Paul von Heyse, Verner von Heidenstam, Karl Adolph Gjellerup, Henrik Pontopiddan, Carl Spitteler, Jacinto Benavente, Grazia Deledda, Erik Axel Karlfeldt, Pearl S. Buck, Frans Eemil Sillanpaa [SIC], Johannes Vilhelm Jensen, Earl Russell, and a few dozen others—mostly Scandinavian nonentities which at one time were highly thought of by a couple dozen mouldy Swedish academics. (Please forgive me for being lax about the diacritical marks in the above names.)
