The Swedish Academy on Thursday will announce the winner of the much-criticized 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, with the awards committee known for its penchant for giving lesser-known writers the spotlight over best-selling authors.
For the past two years, the 18-member academy has bestowed the prestigious prize on American poet Louise Gluck and Tanzanian author Abdulrazak Gurnah, two writers whose works are not widely translated and unknown to the general public – or even to some publishers were .
“After last year, it might be even harder to guess” who could win this year, admitted Lina Kalmteg, literary critic at public broadcaster Swedish Radio, recalling the “total surprise” in the studio when Gurnah’s name was last read out became year.
“I think we can expect a better known name this year after last year’s surprise,” said Bjorn Wiman, culture editor at Swedish reference newspaper Dagens Nyheter.
The academy is slowly recovering from a devastating #MeToo scandal that led to the postponement of the 2018 award and its controversial decision to honor Austrian author Peter Handke a year later.
His pro-Serb positions extended to supporting former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, who was on trial for genocide when he died in 2006.
Three years ago, the panel promised new criteria that would lead to a more global and gender-equitable literary prize.
“The academy is very conscious of its reputation for diversity and gender representation now, in a very different way than before the 2017-2018 scandal,” Wiman told AFP.
“A lot of new people have joined the academy with new perspectives and different credentials,” he said, noting that it’s no longer just made up of “older white men.”
Since the #MeToo scandal, the Academy has awarded the Nobel Prize to two women – Louise Gluck and Olga Tokarczuk from Poland – and one man.
Does that bode well for another woman this year?
This year, Joyce Carol Oates from the United States, Annie Ernaux and Maryse Conde from France, and Margaret Atwood from Canada could win the bid.
An award for Russian author and outspoken Kremlin critic Lyudmila Ulitskaya, who is often cited as a potential candidate, would also send a strong message after Moscow invaded Ukraine.
– Bets are on Houellebecq –
An award for Ulitskaya “would trigger reactions,” Viman said, noting that it would underscore her opposition to the Kremlin but would also be considered controversial for promoting Russian culture at a time when Moscow is worried about its war in Ukraine is insulted.
“It’s the kind of complex intellectual debate that you really want to see around the Nobel Prize,” Wiman said.
Unlike many other literary prizes, there is no shortlist for the Nobel Prize, and nominations for the Academy and its deliberations are kept secret for 50 years.
Left to pure speculation, betting sites list Frenchman Michel Houellebecq as the favourite, whose name has been making the rounds in posh circles for many years.
In second place is British author Salman Rushdie, who was the victim of an attempted assassination in August.
It was 27 years before the Academy finally denounced the Iranian fatwa against the author of The Satanic Verses in 2016, a highly controversial silence that it attributed to its neutrality and independence.
Other names often cited as possible winners include Kenya’s Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Hungary’s Laszlo Krasznahorkai and US authors Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo.
“The great American postmodern novels haven’t been appreciated yet,” observed Jonas Thente, literary critic at Dagens Nyheter.
Other favorites include Jon Fosse and Karl Ove Knausgaard of Norway, who could bring the award back to Scandinavia more than a decade after it went to Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer.
Meanwhile, Maria Hymna Ramnehill, a critic at the regional daily Göteborgs-Posten, hoped the prize would go to French-Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun or Croatian Dubravka Ugresic.
“Both, in different ways, have a body of work that explores identity in terms of nationalism and gender,” she said.
“They speak about their identity in complex ways that highlight the complicated and elusive reality we live in that cannot be explained with simple solutions.”
