Mo Yan

The Nobel Prize is now an insult to literature

Isn’t it time we called bullshit, once and for all, on the Nobel Prize? I’m not talking about the Peace Prize — though that’s a parcel of yuks all of its own. First Barack Obama — who hasn’t made peace anywhere at all, and whose prosecution of the war on terror has seen him described as “George W Bush on steroids” — and now the European Union. Already, I’m imagining tense negotiations in Brussels over who, exactly, gets to put the diploma into his downstairs loo.

But no: it’s a given that the Peace Prize is kind of a joke. What about the Nobel Prize for Literature? Has there ever been an instance of so manifest an absurdity accorded such reverence — such a tottering edifice of pomp erected on such shallow foundations?

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Mo Yan’s creative space

Literary prizes, wrote Kingsley Amis, are “all right if you win them.” China’s political establishment takes a far less relaxed view of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Since the country reintegrated into the global community after the death of Mao, its government has long craved a literary Nobel for a Chinese citizen living, working and thriving in China as proof that the People’s Republic has arrived as a modern world power. China’s longstanding Nobel envy has turned the prize into a symbol of collective achievement, rather than of individual creativity.

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