If Doris Lessing hadn't been awarded a Nobel last year, I would've bet that British playwright Tom Stoppard would be a strong contender as this year's Literature laureate. But Harold Pinter, also British, won in 2005, and considering how controversial the Nobel Literature Prize is, I don't think an over-representation of British laureates would go over well with the rest of the world. Maybe he should be awarded--someday--but as far as this year is concerned, I like Israeli author Amos Oz for the Nobel. I can't think of any other writer who better fits the description of a would-be laureate.

That said, here's some Nobel Literature trivia for you:

• Winston Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature--yes, literature--in 1953 "for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values."
• Of all one hundred four laureates, only eleven women have been awarded Nobels: Doris Lessing (2007, United Kingdom), Elfriede Jelinek (2004, Austria), Wislawa Szymborska (1996, Poland), Toni Morrison (1993, United States), Nadine Gordimer (1991, South Africa), Nelly Sachs (1966, Sweden), Gabriela Mistral (1945, Chile), Pearl S. Buck (1938, United States), Sigrid Undset (1928, Norway), Grazia Deledda (1926, Italy), and Selma Lagerlöf (1909, Sweden).
• The lists of nominated authors are sealed for fifty years.
• Authors considered and rejected for a Literature Nobel include Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Graham Greene, Vladimir Nabokov, Arthur Miller, and Salman Rushdie.
• Why wasn't W. H. Auden ever awarded a Literature Nobel? Two reasons, perhaps: because of errors in his translation of 1961 Peace Prize winner Dag Hammarskjöld's Vägmärken, and for suggesting that Hammarskjöld was gay. (Auden himself was homosexual.)
• France claims the highest number of Literature laureates with thirteen. However, a laureate's country depends on where he or she did the majority of his or her work--not residence or birth country. (For example, American laureate Saul Bellow was Canadian by birth.)
• Jean-Paul Sartre (1964, France) was the only Literature laureate who voluntarily refused the Nobel.
• Only one physicist has been awarded the Literature Nobel: Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn (1970, Russia). (He taught physics and astronomy at Ryazan when A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published.)

Comments

[Citizen Reader]

Why did Sartre refuse it, do you know? I love that guy. He made cantankerous an art form.

[theorist]

Don't you wish we had as many good candidates for president? So sad.