Jon Fosse and the tricky slope of relevance for the Nobel Prize

All of these awards — the Oscars, Grammys, Nobel and many other Western institutions — have sat on lofty pedestals for decades, if not centuries. Now, as the Internet has democratised information, the relevance, authority and process of these awards is called into question more frequently. Their lack of diversity has been interrogated, they’ve even been accused of Eurocentricism.

This applies specifically to the Nobel Prize for literature, part of the suite of prizes that Vox once called the “most controversial award on Earth”. For a century old institution, a laureate selection process is notoriously opaque — nominee lists are sealed off for 50 years — is almost paradoxical in today’s environment of greater transparency and laissez-faire information.

Former permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Sara Danius, who passed away in 2019, once said in an interview: “What does it take to win the Nobel Prize in Literature? What do I know? I don’t know. All I know is that the criteria are simple, but tough. You get awarded not for a single work, but for a life’s work. You are expected to come up with something new in terms of content or form or both. And that is how you win the Nobel Prize in Literature.”

“A life’s work” is a lot, but also an arbitrary metric, especially when it is regarded in light of the difficulty of adjudging something as subjective and ephemeral as literature, and the people the committee has chosen to give prizes to — and those it hasn’t. Bob Dylan, not a novelist, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016 for creating “new poetic expressions” — a decision that was met with silence (initially) by Dylan himself. Meanwhile, canonical authors like Leo Tolstoy, James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges have not been Nobel laureates.

Crowd favourites like Salman Rushdie are yet to win it; even as the literary cognoscenti dreads the day Haruki Murakami, among the most popular writers on the planet, will be awarded a Nobel Prize. In a 2019 piece called “What’s the point of Nobel prizes?” The Guardian notes the abject lack of diversity in these awards.

More than 90 per cent of Nobel prizes have been won by men. Only 15 of the 100+ Nobel laureates for literature are women. The most common age of a Nobel prize winner is 63 — Malala Yousufzai, who won in 2014, was the youngest ever laureate. More than a third of Nobel prizes have been won by Americans — only nine Indians have won the Nobel Prize in various fields, with Rabindranath Tagore the only laureate in literature. Glaringly, Mahatma Gandhi was not a Peace Prize laureate, despite being nominated five times. In 2006, a Nobel committee acknowledged this as one of the gravest omissions in the Prize’s over-a-century history.

This could be extrapolated to the very idea of awards—any awards that pretend to celebrate individual contributions to humanity or culture. Especially when not being decided by vox pop (and in the Oscars case, even then), we are now somewhat wiser to how they are manufactured. Merit, while important, is a small factor; as important are visibility, cultural clout and cache, social media followings, and insider relationships.

In the case of the Nobel Prize for Literature, we best believe that the process is a lot more above-board. You could accuse them of Eurocentricism, sure, but not of giving away prizes to “friends” of the Academy. But as a recent piece in The Economist, titled “The Nobel prize in literature is prestigious, lucrative and bonkers” demonstrates, it isn’t easy either. The judging criteria is “at best esoteric”. The field of competitors is across languages, translations and genres — so vast, it’s unwieldy. Coming to a consensus for the jury is its own special kind of hell.

Some will say that how we react to award announcements says more about our own preferences, biases and worldviews. It is easy to be dismissive, to wonder about how a European author’s work could speak to someone sitting in hot and heavy Mumbai, and why a group of other Europeans thought it was important to endorse him.

But outside the whataboutery — the scandals, controversies, questionable decision-making, accusations — there is one aspect to awards like the Nobel Prize that can be considered “redemptive”. The possibility of discovery. At least once a year, when the Nobel Prizes are announced, we go on the Internet to understand who these individuals are and what they’ve done to be awarded such incomparable prestige.

At the very least, it is general knowledge. We learn of the research that led directly to the mRNA vaccines to fight COVID-19. We learn that it is now possible to get images from inside atoms and molecules, which can help with early detection of diseases like lung cancer.

Iranian women's rights activist Narges Mohammadi won the Nobel Peace Prize 2023. She has been in prison since 2015, sentenced to 31 years in jail by the Iranian regime. (Photo: Twitter)

We may never fully understand quantum phenomena, but we know that “quantum dots” is something that can change the world — in some very important way. We take the chance to dive deeper into the women’s movement in Iran, and Narges Mohammadi’s peerless contribution to the cause of “women, life, freedom”.

We realise that Jon Fosse, author, translator and playwright, has been committed to “giving voice to the unsayable” through his plays and prose for the last 40 years. That we might be hearing of him only now because his work, largely written in the Nynorsk or new Norwegian language, has only recently begun to be translated for mainstream English readership. And that getting a copy of Septology — to add our teetering piles of unread books also featuring past Nobel laureates Annie Ernaux, Mo Yan and Doris Lessing, among others — is going to be a bit of a wait now.