The announcement of the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature usually prompts one of three reactions. The first is “Who?”; the second is “Why?”; the third—and by far the rarest—is “Hurrah!” This year, the reaction was firmly in the first two camps. On October 5th Jon Fosse, a Norwegian, was awarded the most prestigious writing prize in the world. Most literary buffs had never heard of him. Fosse writes mainly in the Nynorsk language, which is, even among Norwegian writers, a minority pursuit. His best-known (but still little-known) trilogy is called Septology, which touts itself as a “radically other reading experience”.
In some ways awarding this prize is a simple process. As is customary, Fosse was telephoned, just before 1pm Swedish time. As is also usual, he picked up the phone to hear a Scandinavian voice telling him that he had won the coveted prize, which comes with SKr11m (around $1m). Like many Nobel winners, he may have assumed it was a hoax. Like many, he may then have opened the champagne. Or perhaps, as Doris Lessing did, he may simply have sighed and said: “Oh, Christ.”
In almost every other way the prize is a nightmare of complexity. Judging anything, even a 100-meter race, can be hard. Judging literature—a symphony, not a sprint—is much harder. Aristotle might have been briskly able to outline what makes a piece of writing great in his Poetics; few others have felt so confident. “Posh bingo” is how the writer Julian Barnes once described the Booker Prize, another literary prize awarded annually for the best novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom and Ireland. (He was short-listed for it three times before his fourth proved to be the charm.)
Prize judges can seem less like they are making measured, critical decisions than picking names out of a hat. When, in 2016, the Swedish Academy’s Nobel Committee for Literature picked Bob Dylan, the American singer and songwriter, there was an international outcry. As Anders Olsson, the current chair of the committee mutedly observes: “We always get criticism.”
Like many Nobel winners, he may have assumed it was a hoax.
In its very first year, the Nobel Committee caused outrage when it failed to give the accolade to Leo Tolstoy and offered it to the poet Sully Prudhomme instead—a name almost as underwhelming then as it is now. “So many fantastic writers” were not only not chosen, admits Olsson, but not even nominated: Anton Chekhov, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf among them. Jorge Luis Borges, Henrik Ibsen and Henry James also failed to win (though they were, at least, nominated).
Some may have sympathy for the judges. For one thing, the Nobel’s judging criteria are at best esoteric; at worst they are wholly opaque. Alfred Nobel—a man who was better at chemistry than writing—stated in his will that one of the prizes in his name was to be awarded to “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”. Whatever that might mean.
The field of potential competitors for the literary prize is vast. Authors do not actively enter to be considered for the Nobel. Instead, the judges must choose from all living writers, writing in every language in the world. Given that there are 7,000-odd languages, the number of potential competitors is vast. It is, acknowledges Olsson, “an immense” task. And, naturally, a nonsense one. The six members of the judging committee are not really considering the oeuvre of every Irish author writing in Gaelic or every Papua New Guinean one writing in Hiri Motu.
Judges are, however, considering quite a lot of them. Each year, the committee sends around 4,000 invitations to literary organizations across the world requesting nominations by February 1st. These nominations become a long list of 200 authors who are whittled down to a short list of 20 by April. By May, they have produced a yet shorter list of five candidates (which, like all the other lists, is kept secret for 50 years). Then the judging and the reading begin in earnest. It is as fair as it can be, which is to say, extremely unfair.
Choosing between books is “very, very hard”, says Neil MacGregor, a former director of the British Museum and the chair of the Booker Prize committee in 2022. Books are so very different. According to MacGregor, judges must adjudicate between a book on the Sri Lankan civil war here and the inward musings of a middle-class American woman there. In other words, they are picking between literary “apples and oranges”.
The judges must choose from all living writers, writing in every language in the world.
It is even harder than that again. The question for a judge is not merely: do I, as an individual, like this book? It is: can we, as a group, accept it? What is required for a book to win a prize is not individual enthusiasm but “general assent”, says MacGregor: it is “a bit like a criminal jury”. And at times the atmosphere on prizes can be as fun as that makes it sound. Judging the Booker Prize led Joanna Lumley, a British actress, to conclude that the “so-called bitchy world of acting” was a “tea party compared with the piranha-infested waters of publishing”.
Judging books presents other difficulties, too. The long lists for modern prizes are just that: long. Booker judges must wade through around 170 books in seven months; Nobel judges through the output of 200 authors in just two. In truth, most do not. “I don’t believe they can,” says Michael Wood, a historian who has chaired a different contest, the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction.
Each judge has her own method; some read 30-40 pages of each. Others scan them to see if they are a contender. Happily for judges (if not readers), all too often the answer is a flat no. The author Malcolm Muggeridge withdrew from judging the Booker because he was “nauseated and appalled” by the entries. MacGregor, more mildly, on several occasions found himself putting down books and wondering, “How could anybody have thought this was worth publishing?”
The Nobel presents other difficulties. Unlike many prizes, it considers works in translation—and poetry, as the saying has it, gets lost in translation. Prose does not do that brilliantly either: even “Je ne sais quoi” loses a certain je ne sais quoi when it is in English. Some works are so poetic, so tied to their own language that they are untranslatable and therefore out of the running. Internationalism offers other complexities. The prize purports to be worldwide but has tended to be Eurocentric: of the 120 winners to date, around 100 have come from Europe or America. This is a bias of which the Academy is acutely—and, you sense, uncomfortably—aware.
The difficulties with the prize were, in fact, numerous and clear to the Swedish Academy from the beginning. When they were offered the donation from Nobel, the Academy had “some hesitations” about accepting it, according to Olsson. Given the criticism that the Academy has sometimes faced, perhaps it wishes it had not. Naturally, all Nobel Prizes have had controversies—but few as ferocious as those raised by the literary one.
Though not everyone is cross. As Barnes mused, writers might see prizes as a lottery—until, that is, they win them. Then they realize that those cursed prize judges are, in fact, “the wisest heads in literary Christendom”.
