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Nobel speculations: Who will win the Literature prize?

The winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced later today, and there are plenty of rumours.

Published: 5 October 2017 07:30 CEST
Nobel speculations: Who will win the Literature prize?
Sara Danius, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, announcing last year's award. Photo: Magnus Hjalmarson Neideman/SvD/TT

The Swedish Academy stunned the world last year when it awarded the Nobel Literature Prize to US counter-culture icon and rock star Bob Dylan. This year, experts say, the laureate will be more conventional.

Weeks of speculation and buzz about the Academy's pick for 2017 will come to an end on Thursday at 1pm Stockholm time, when its permanent secretary Sara Danius announces this year's winner.

Not only are the Academy members expected to go with a more orthodox choice, predictions are that they will also honour someone who enjoys broad consensus and is seen as Nobel-worth, with the institution keen to avoid the media spectacle surrounding Dylan's win.

The first singer-songwriter to win the prestigious prize, the rock legend didn't comment on his Nobel for several weeks and then snubbed the formal prize ceremony in Stockholm.

“The Academy is actually a very discreet society and we shouldn't expect anything sensational” this year, Clemens Poellinger, literary critic for Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet, told AFP.

READ ALSO: Follow The Local's 2017 Nobel coverage here

So who will get the nod?

The Academy is known for its cloak-and-dagger methods to prevent any leaks, resorting to code names for authors and fake book covers when reading in public.

Pundits therefore try to dissect the Academy's latest interests to guess the winner, while punters have a field day on betting sites.

On Wednesday, novelists Haruki Murakami of Japan and Ngugi wa Thiong'o of Kenya had the lowest odds on numerous sites. They were followed by Canada's Margaret Atwood, whose novel 'The Handmaid's Tale' was recently made into a well-received TV series, and Israel's Amos Oz.

Yet another man?

Will the prize go to yet another man? Of the 113 laureates honoured since the prize was first awarded to France's Sully Prudhomme in 1901, only 14 are women.

But the Academy insists it doesn't take gender into consideration, nor nationality, language or genre for that matter.

“The gender balance among those who have received the prize is embarrassing” and the Swedish Academy must be aware of it, said Rakel Chukri, the cultural editor of regional daily Sydsvenskan.

If the Academy were to go with a political pick, it could choose Syrian-born and secular poet Adonis, a stark critic of dictatorship who blends classical and modern styles.

Meanwhile, two Icelandic writers are also making buzz: Sjon, the pen name of poet Sigurjon Birgir Sigurdsson, and Jon Kalman Stefansson.

Halldor Laxness was the only Icelandic author to win the Nobel, in 1955.

Behind-the-scenes pressure

Each February, the Academy makes a list of all the nominations it has received by those eligible to do so – including former laureates and university professors – before reducing it to five names in May.

The members then spend the summer reading those writers, before making their choice in October.

Behind the scenes, intense lobbying campaigns are mounted to influence the Academy, though its members insist they are immune to such efforts.

The lobbying can even backfire against the writers.

Kjell Espmark, an Academy member for more than 30 years, told daily Dagens Nyheter that the institution was regularly courted by regimes, especially in countries that have industrialized rapidly.

“They want an atomic bomb and a laureate,” he said.

He recounted how during a visit to Portugal in the 1990s, he was approached by then president Mario Soares.

“He walked up with Jose Saramago and said 'You give the prize to this guy'. Saramago was so embarrassed he wanted to disappear,” Espmark recalled.

The Academy, which had already been mulling Saramago for the prize, found itself in a tricky situation, he said: Should they turn their backs on Saramago, or ignore Soares' blunt move?

They ultimately honoured Saramago in 1998. He remains the only Portuguese-language writer to win the Nobel, though Antonio Lobo Antunes' name regularly appears in the speculation.

“This year I think it's going to be either Antonio Lobo Antunes or Ismail Kadare from Albania. Both of them are writers who have been tipped for the Nobel for a long time, and both of them are names that when they are read out, everyone will think 'Ah, of course they deserve the prize', and there'll be no objection,” said Dagens Nyheter's culture editor Björn Wiman.

At the Hedengrens bookstore in central Stockholm, owner Nicklas Björkholm has set up a wall with books by possible winners, including Spain's Javier Marias, Americans Joan Didion and Don DeLillo, Poland's Olga Tokarczuk and David Grossmann of Israel.

His personal favourite for the prize is Korean poet Ko Un because, he insists, “the time has come for a non-anglophone and an Asian”.

Article by the AFP's Helene Dauschy

HISTORY

‘Lost’ manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

A book by one of France's most celebrated and controversial literary figures arrives in bookstores this week, 78 years after the manuscript disappeared

Published: 4 May 2022 11:42 CEST
'Lost' manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

It is a rare thing when the story of a book’s publication is even more mysterious than the plot of the novel itself.

But that might be said of Guerre (War) by one of France’s most celebrated and controversial literary figures, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, which arrives in bookstores on Thursday, some 78 years after its manuscript disappeared.

Celine’s reputation has somehow survived the fact that he was one of France’s most eager collaborators with the Nazis.

Already a superstar thanks to his debut novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Celine became one of the most ardent anti-Semitic propagandists even before France’s occupation.

In June 1944, with the Allies advancing on Paris, the writer abandoned a pile of his manuscripts in his Montmartre apartment.

Celine feared rough treatment from authorities in liberated France, having spent the war carousing with the Gestapo, and giving up Jews and foreigners to the Nazi regime and publishing racist pamphlets about Jewish world conspiracies.

For decades, no one knew what happened to his papers, and he accused resistance fighters of burning them. But at some point in the 2000s, they ended up with retired journalist Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, who passed them – completely out of the blue – to Celine’s heirs last summer.

‘A miracle’
Despite the author’s history, reviews of the 150-page novel, published by Gallimard, have been unanimous in their praise.

“The end of a mystery, the discovery of a great text,” writes Le Point; a “miracle,” says Le Monde; “breathtaking,” gushes Journal du Dimanche.

Gallimard has yet to say whether the novel will be translated.

Like much of Celine’s work, Guerre is deeply autobiographical, recounting his experiences during World War I.

It opens with 20-year-old Brigadier Ferdinand finding himself miraculously alive after waking up on a Belgian battlefield, follows his treatment and hasty departure for England – all based on Celine’s real experiences.

His time across the Channel is the subject of another newly discovered novel, Londres (London), to be published this autumn.

If French reviewers seem reluctant to focus on Celine’s rampant World War II anti-Semitism, it is partly because his early writings (Guerre is thought to date from 1934) show little sign of it.

Journey to the End of the Night was a hit among progressives for its anti-war message, as well as a raw, slang-filled style that stuck two fingers up at bourgeois sensibilities.

Celine’s attitude to the Jews only revealed itself in 1937 with the publication of a pamphlet, Trifles for a Massacre, which set him on a new path of racial hatred and conspiracy-mongering.

He never back-tracked. After the war, he launched a campaign of Holocaust-denial and sought to muddy the waters around his own war-time exploits – allowing him to worm his way back into France without repercussions.

‘Divine surprise’
Many in the French literary scene seem keen to separate early and late Celine.

“These manuscripts come at the right time – they are a divine surprise – for Celine to become a writer again: the one who matters, from 1932 to 1936,” literary historian Philippe Roussin told AFP.

Other critics say the early Celine was just hiding his true feelings.

They highlight a quote that may explain the gap between his progressive novels and reactionary feelings: “Knowing what the reader wants, following fashions like a shopgirl, is the job of any writer who is very financially constrained,” Celine wrote to a friend.

Despite his descent into Nazism, he was one of the great chroniclers of the trauma of World War I and the malaise of the inter-war years.

An exhibition about the discovery of the manuscripts opens on Thursday at the Gallimard Gallery and includes the original, hand-written sheets of Guerre.

They end with a line that is typical of Celine: “I caught the war in my head. It is locked in my head.”

In the final years before his death in 1961, Celine endlessly bemoaned the loss of his manuscripts.

The exhibition has a quote from him on the wall: “They burned them, almost three manuscripts, the pest-purging vigilantes!”

This was one occasion – not the only one – where he was proved wrong.

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