Thank you Ken. Nobel prizes are great for winners. The Literature and Economics prizes, and sometimes the Peace prize are the more subjective and controversial and therefore less deserving of critical and universal acceptance. One committee’s best writer may be another’s okay writer. Contrast the Literature prize for example, with the Chemistry, Medicine, and Physics’ prizes for groundbreaking works that open new knowledge pathways, positively advance science, and improve, and save lives.
oa
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of kenneth harrow
Sent: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 10:32 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Chinua Achebe and the Nobel Prize in Literature
william golding, among other zeros, won the noble prize, while giants of the 20th century like borges did not.
name another author with the stature of borges in the 20th century.
achebe was certainly deserving of the prize, as are Djebar, braithwaite, and other wonderful african, african american, latin, and arab writers. compare jamaica kincaid, for instance, with tomas transtromer or efrieda jelenik or imre kertesz.??????????
sorry, when golding got the award for his rotten anti-communist allegory, i really was disappointed. compare him with marquez, for instance. whom would you rather have on your bedtime table?
arrow of god or lord of the flies? no comparison
ken
On 3/27/13 6:02 AM, Olu Abejide 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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kenneth w. harrow
faculty excellence advocate
distinguished professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839
harrow@msu.edu
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