Segun Ogungbemi.
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Prof. Ogungbemi,If Nobel prizes are awarded to those who "deserve(d)" it, why and how is it that "Nigeria is LUCKY to have someone with the prize"? In my view, "deserving it" and being "lucky to have it" do not amount to the same thing. I was thinking that philosophy, particularly logic, would have taught us that we are never lucky to get what we deserve if we deserve it(!)Enjoy the season; perhaps humanity deserves Easter!XI--On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 1:14 PM, Segun Ogungbemi <seguno2013@gmail.com> wrote:
Those who give the award are people with sound minds who are not emotional or carried away by praise singers of a particular author. If Achebe deserved it in their own judgement they would not hesitate to give him. Now that is dead nothing can be done about it.The pride we have for now is that Nigeria is lucky to have someone with the prize, Wole Soyinka. He won it without any praise singers because he merited it. Achebe did not merit it in spite of his praise singers and there is nothing anyone could do about it. Perhaps in the next existence, Achebe might be lucky. Who knows?Prof. Segun Ogungbemi.
Sent from my iPhoneIsa yuguda bauchi state governor in northern Nigeria sack 200 academic lecturers of College of education Azare after he sack more than 300 secondary school teachers last month
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On Mar 27, 2013 11:20 AM, "Olu Abejide" <mystock@ymail.com> wrote:
>
> Now that he is gone, he cannot win it anymore. The Nobel Prize in Literature is not awarded posthumously. Achebe won almost everything except the mother of all literary prizes. Many people think he should have won it. But he did not. Why?
>
> The Nobel Prize in Literature has had a chequered 110 years history. Between 1901 and 2012, it has been awarded 105 times to 109 Laureates (no prizes were awarded during the War years). Many of the world's best writers were honoured with the prize. But there have also been a few remarkable omissions. Many people, especially Africans, think the late Chinua Achebe is one such serious omission. But Achebe is in good company. Great writers who did not win it include Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, Marcel Proust, Anton Chekov, Ezra Pound, Mark Twain, James Joyce, Graham Greene, Thomas Hardy, W. H. Auden, Vladimir Nabokov, and Jorge Luiz Borges. Like Achebe, all these writers are dead and can no longer win the prize. There are some writers alive now whom many people believe are being constantly bypassed. These include Philip Roth and Milan Kundera. But there is still hope for them.
>
> Some people think some writers who received the prize of late are not really deserving of it. These are Dario Fo (Italian, 1997), Elfriede Jelenik, (Austrian, 2004) who, herself, thought she didn't deserve it (a member of the academy resigned in protest of her award), and Herta Muller (Romania, 2009). If these people won it, how could Chinua Achebe not win it?
>
> It is difficult to say who deserves the prize and who does not. It is both a "judgement" and a "quota" prize. It is judgement because a group of people (even if experts in the field), based on their subjective judgements, decide who to give it to. It is not like giving it to a person who first crosses the finishing line in a marathon. It is a quota prize because every year, someone must win it. There can be no year in which nobody is found worthy to win it. But this disadvantage, perhaps, does not matter so much since the prize is awarded for a body of work unlike the yearly ones like the Booker or the Pulitzer which are given to books published in specific years with the danger of a book winning in a year in which none of the entries was particularly good. For the Nobel Prize there is enough time to weigh an author's life time production rather than what he achieved in a particular year. The net is wide enough to capture the best in the world. An author who does not win this year can still win next year without producing anything new – if he does not die before then.
>
> Sometimes, the prize can come late in a writer's life. Tomas Transtromer won it when he was 80. A brilliant poet, rumours had it that he had been long on the committee's shortlist but the committee denied him the prize because he was one of their own (a Swede) and they didn't want to be seen to be favouring their own countryman. By the time they gave him the prize in 2011 he was old and crippled and could hardly walk to receive the award from his sovereign's hands. Doris Lessing remains the oldest winner of the Prize when it was awarded to her when she was 88. Perhaps if Achebe, too, had lived longer, he may have made it. But given the fact that his last major work, ANTHILLS OF THE SAVANNAH, was published more than 25 years ago, and he had not won the prize around that time, it was unlikely that he would have won it if he had lived longer without producing anything new. Read More
>
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