It says nothing about the Nobel Prize for Literature except that only one is awarded each year. So there are bound to be some misses. That Chinua Achebe may be seen as one of the misses detracts from neither Achebe nor the Nobel Prize.
AyoI invite you to follow me on Twitter @naijama---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <abiolairele@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 8:05 PM
Subject: Re: [WoleSoyinkaSociety] Fwd: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Chinua Achebe and the Nobel Prize in Literature
To: WoleSoyinkaSociety@yahoogroups.com
Let us note too that Aime Cesaire, Leopold Sedar Senghor and Edouard Glissant were not awarded the Nobel Prize despite the resonance of their work. What does this say of the prize? Irele
Sent from my BlackBerry wireless device from MTNFrom: OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU <tvade3@gmail.com>Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2013 18:32:48 +0000To: wolesoyinkasociety<wolesoyinkasociety@yahoogroups.com>ReplyTo: WoleSoyinkaSociety@yahoogroups.comSubject: [WoleSoyinkaSociety] Fwd: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Chinua Achebe and the Nobel Prize in Literature
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From: Olu Abejide <mystock@ymail.com>
Date: Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 10:02 AM
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Chinua Achebe and the Nobel Prize in Literature
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
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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