Tag Archives: Nobel Prize for Literature

Author Ruskin Bond calls literature Nobel for Bob Dylan ‘wrong decision’

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Eminent writer Ruskin Bond said the decision to award the Nobel Prize for Literature to singer-poet Bob Dylan was “not a right one” and is an “insult” to all the great writers who have received the award so far.

“Dylan is a successful musician and a great entertainer, but I am not sure whether he was given the award in the right category,” Bond said during a conversation organised as part of ‘River Talks — the North East Literary Festival’ here.

Dylan is not really a writer and awarding the prize to him in the literature category is a “great insult to all the writers who have already received the award and also to those who rightly deserve it”, the author said. Read more

Nobel literature jury warns to give leaked nominees the boot

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Leaking names of writers shortlisted for the Nobel literature prize may lead to their disqualification from the prestigious award, the head of the prize jury warned on Thursday.

“There are nominators who like trumpeting in public which person they nominated,” Peter Englund, who is also the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, wrote on his blog.

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The dangers of treating literary fiction at par with commercial fiction: Horace Engdahl

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“We talk in the same way about everything which is published, and literary criticism is poorer for it,” said Swedish Academy member Horace Engdahl. “This revolution has marginalised proper literature, which has not got worse, but which has seen its status change. Before, there were mountains and lowlands. Today, the outlook is that of an archipelago, where each island represents a genre … with everything coexisting without a hierarchy or centre”: The Guardian

Horace Engdahl swedish academy nobel prize literature judgeWestern literature is being impoverished by financial support for writers and by creative writing programmes, according to a series of blistering comments from Swedish Academy member Horace Engdahl, speaking shortly before the winner of the Nobel prize for literature is awarded.

In an interview with French paper La Croix, Engdahl said that the “professionalisation” of the job of the writer, via grants and financial support, was having a negative effect on literature. “Even though I understand the temptation, I think it cuts writers off from society, and creates an unhealthy link with institutions,” he told La Croix. “Previously, writers would work as taxi drivers, clerks, secretaries and waiters to make a living. Samuel Beckett and many others lived like this. It was hard – but they fed themselves, from a literary perspective.” Read more

Haruki Murakami joint favourite to win Nobel prize for literature

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Three days before the winner is announced, novelist shares odds of 4/1 with Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, while Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich is third favourite at 7/1: The Guardian

MurakamiWith just three days to go before the 2014 Nobel prize for literature is awarded, Haruki Murakami and the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o are joint favourites to win the literary world’s greatest honour.

The Swedish Academy announced this morning that the winner of the literature Nobel would be revealed on Thursday 9 October at 1pm CET (noon BST). Ladbrokes, which has frequently seen the eventual victor surge to the top of its odds in the days before the announcement, said today that Ngũgĩ and Murakami were, at 4/1, joint favourites to win Thursday’s eight million kronor (£693,000) prize. Read more

Ten things you should know about poet Rabindranath Tagore

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From an an interview with Amit Chaudhuri on Rabindranath Tagore by Prithvi Varatharajan in Asymptote

  1. Rabindranath Tagore was India’s most famous modern poet and is one of its greatest cultural icons. Born in 1861, Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1913, which brought him international fame. tagore
  2. Tagore was very precocious and began to write early on. He produced a very interesting work by the time he was fifteen, pretending to be a poet from medieval times. And by the time he was seventeen or eighteen he was quite acknowledged within Bengal as a poet to watch, and was in fact singled out for praise by the first great Indian novelist in Bengal, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay.
  3. The painter William Rothenstein was actually a friend of the Tagore family and ran into Rabindranath in 1910. He was speaking to Abanindranath Tagore [Rabindranath’s nephew] when he noticed this person in the room who wasn’t saying very much, and he asked Abanindranath who this very quiet man was and found out it was Rabindranath, who had this high reputation as a poet. Tagore gave Rothenstein his translations of his own songs—translations that would comprise the Gitanjali—when he travelled to London in 1912.For whatever reason, Rothenstein was completely won over by Tagore’s poems, and introduced Tagore to people like Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats.
  4. At Pound’s insistence Harriet Monroe published some of the poems in Poetry (Chicago). And there we see Tagore’s transition to international fame and celebrity.
  5. Tagore then received the Nobel Prize in 1913 and soon after that Pound and Yeats began to look at the poems and Tagore in a different way. Read more

Chinese Nobel laureate hopes new film can revive art

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Requiem for beautyChinese writer Gao Xingjian, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000, said Friday before a screening of his new film in Taipei that he hopes it can reflect the spirit of art and bring that spirit into people’s lives.

Modern life is full of materialism and politics, while people no longer talk about feelings, thoughts and the meaning of life, Gao said prior to the Taiwan premiere of his experimental film Requiem For Beauty. Read more

Mo Yan through a dog’s eyes

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Carlos Rojas in the Public Books

Mo YanMo Yan, born Guan Moye, is widely regarded as one of contemporary China’s most talented and accomplished authors. Predictably, his receipt of the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature has brought him an avalanche of new attention. Many critics have celebrated him for being the first Chinese national to win the coveted award, while others have attempted to critically assess Mo Yan’s standing as a public intellectual. There have been countless discussions of Mo Yan’s work itself, examining his prose, his focus on rural Shandong, and his deployment of what the Nobel committee called “hallucinatory realism.” Here, however, I will approach the author from a different angle: how did Mo Yan, near the beginning of his literary career, imagine his relationship to an institutionally sanctioned literary tradition, as well as to other contemporary writers positioned at that tradition’s outskirts?

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India: Of noble mind and of Nobel stature

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tagoreA hundred years ago, a slender book — the English Gitanjali of Tagore — caught the world unawares. Wearing a deceptively frail look, the book has ever since arched over temporal and spatial distances to enthral hearts and incite critical responses. It was for this English Gitanjali that Rabindranath Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in November 1913. Read more

Tagore: In honour of the bard

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tagoreRabindranath Tagore received the Nobel prize in literature for Gitanjali on November 13, 1913, exactly 100 years ago. To celebrate the centenary of Rabindranath Tagore receiving the Nobel prize, Bhowanipore Baikali Association presented a dazzling evening of poetry, music and dance at the Science City auditorium on November 13. Spearheaded by Pramita Mallick, a wonderful Rabindrasangeet singer and an impeccable organizer, Thou Hast Made Me Endless was a presentation with a difference. Every minute detail was dealt with care and concern to arrange a flawless programme.

It was crisp and precise with a galaxy of artists on the stage. Soumitra Chatterjee, Sharmila Tagore, Harsh Neotia, Lee Alison Sibley and Sangeeta Datta read and recited from Gitanjali. Sugata Bose, a Harvard University professor, was made the master of ceremony.

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Nobel Prize disappointment for Haruki Murakami; Alice Munro is the 2013 Nobel laureate

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munro_postcardThe Nobel Prize in Literature 2013 was awarded to Alice Munro “master of the contemporary short story”, said the Nobel Academy.

The Nobel Prize for 2013 in literature was awarded to Canadian writer Alice Munro on 10 October.

Japanese author Haruki Murakami was the favourite since the book of Ladbrokes opened.

Short story supremo Alice Munro had made an eleventh-hour leap to become second favourite to win this year’s Nobel prize for literature.

Munro, a perennial contender for the Nobel, is considered one of the world’s greatest living short-story writers. Her tales of small town Canadian life explore the big themes of life, love and death.

She began writing in the late 1960s, and in June – following last year’s publication of a collection including four biographical shorts, Dear Life – she announced her intention to retire.

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