Nobel Prize in Literature
The Nobel Prize for literature announcement is tomorrow. And like every year I will simply say: Salman Rushdie, please!
My favorite living writer, no one is as original and world-opening as Rushdie. His playful language and unstoppable imagination have always made him my top choice. Come on, he totally deserves it.
His memoir Knife was shortlisted this year for the National Book Awards which is great.
The odds this year are the same as usual:
Can Xue – 10/1
Gerald Murnane – 12/1
Haruki Murakami– 14/1
César Aira – 16/1
Ersi Sotiropoulos – 16/1
Margaret Atwood – 16/1
Thomas Pynchon – 16/1
Anne Carson – 20/1
Bushra al-Maqtari – 20/1
Carl Frode Tiller – 20/1
I love Can Xue. Still have not read Murname or Carson and have not heard of Tiller.
Further down on the list is Don Lillo and László Krasznahorkai – both 25/1. Salman Rushdie and Mieko Kanai are also 25/1 William T. Vollmann – 28/1
(Hoping to read Krasznahorkai Genji-esque novella later this month and write about it here)
Martha Nussbaum – 33/1
Amitav Ghosh – 40/1
Yoko Tawada – 50/1
Yu Hua – 50/1
Here are Disco King predictions. People do love Alexis Wright (in addition to David Murane) and Australia has been snubbed for a long time.
Anyway—exciting!
And here is my essay on Lithium Mining—the book was long-listed for the National book award but didn’t make the short-list. Still really recommend it.
Right now my favorites for the other awards remain: Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional, Kushner’s Creation Lake and Miranda July’s All Fours. Very female lists this year-not much beyond America, Europe and Australia….maybe the Nobel Prize tomorrow will change that…?
I looked up the winner only to find it not mentioned here. So many wonderful authors, so little time…. (to paraphrase a saying)
In spite of the disappointment you must feel that Rushdie didn't win, I have to admit that one of the things I really like about the Nobel Prize is its unpredictability. It's not like the Oscars or even the Booker, where a certain inevitability prevails. It's not a popularity contest, or a competition with heavy lobbying behind it. The prize's choices are idiosyncratic but always in the service of literature. This year's winner was not even on your list, but you know her. There may not be enough Nobels to go around for all the great authors in the world. In the end, that's a good thing.