STOCKHOLM — The
Swedish Academy will on
Thursday announce the 2022 winner of the often-criticized Nobel Literature
Prize, with the award committee known for its penchant for spotlighting
lesser-known writers over bestselling authors.
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In the past two years, the 18-member Academy has
bestowed the prestigious prize on US poet Louise Gluck and Tanzanian author
Abdulrazak Gurnah, two writers whose work had not been widely translated and
was not known to the broad public — or even some publishers.
“After last year, I think it’s maybe even a bit harder
to guess” who could win this year, admitted Lina Kalmteg, literary critic for
public broadcaster Swedish Radio, recalling the “total surprise” in the studio
when Gurnah’s name was read out last year.
“I think we can expect a more well-known name this
year, after last year’s surprise”, said Bjorn Wiman, culture editor at Sweden’s
newspaper of reference Dagens Nyheter.
The Academy is slowly recovering from a devastating
#MeToo scandal that led to the postponement of the 2018 prize, and its
controversial decision a year later to honor Austrian author Peter Handke.
His pro-Serbian positions extended to backing
Serbia’s former president Slobodan Milosevic, who was on trial for genocide
when he died in 2006.
Three years ago, the body promised new criteria
would lead to a more global and gender-equal literature prize.
“The Academy is now very conscious of its reputation
when it comes to diversity and gender representation, in a totally different
way than they were before the 2017-2018 scandal”, Wiman told AFP.
“A lot of new people have joined the Academy with
new perspectives and other references”, he said, noting that it was no longer
just made up of “older white men”.
Since the #MeToo scandal, the Academy has awarded
the Nobel to two women — Louise Gluck and Olga Tokarczuk of Poland — and one
man.
Does that bode well for another woman this year?
If so, Joyce Carol Oates of the US, Annie Ernaux,
and Maryse Conde of France, and Canada’s Margaret Atwood could get the nod this
year.
A prize to Russian author and outspoken Kremlin
critic Lyudmila Ulitskaya, often cited as a potential candidate, would also
send a strong message after Moscow’s invasion of
Ukraine.
Bets are on Houellebecq
A prize to Ulitskaya “would
spark reactions”, Wiman said, noting it would highlight her opposition to the
Kremlin but also be considered controversial for promoting Russian culture at a
time when
Moscow is being lambasted for its war in Ukraine.
“This is the kind of complex intellectual debate you
really want to see around the Nobel”, Wiman said.
Unlike many other literary awards, there is no
shortlist for the Nobel, and the nominations to the Academy and its
deliberations are kept secret for 50 years.
Left to mere speculation, betting sites list the
favorite as France’s Michel Houellebecq, whose name has made the rounds in
Nobel circles for many years.
In second spot is British author
Salman Rushdie, who
was the victim of an attempted murder attack in August.
It took the
Academy 27 years to finally denounce, in 2016, the Iranian fatwa on “The
Satanic Verses” author, a highly controversial silence it attributed to its
neutrality and independence.
Other names often cited as possible winners are
Kenya’s Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Hungary’s Laszlo Krasznahorkai and US authors Thomas
Pynchon and Don DeLillo.
“The great American postmodern novels haven’t been
honored yet,” Jonas Thente, literary critic at Dagens Nyheter, noted.
Yet other favorites include Jon Fosse and Karl Ove
Knausgaard of Norway, who could bring the prize back to Scandinavia more than a
decade after it went to Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer.
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