Many times it is not all noble in Literature Nobel.
The Prelude
The annual
October buzz from Stockholm - announcement of Nobel Prizes - for 2020 is just
over. The laborious process comprising of inviting nominations (except for
Peace Prize), short-listing, final selection and announcement spanning over a period
from September of the previous year to October of the award-year has been
repeated without much change since 1901. The theatre of culmination for the
majority of prizes is Stockholm with the grand award ceremony on 10th
December and for Peace Prize, it is in Oslo, on some other date. The Economic Sciences Award,
established in 1968 by Sweden's Central Bank, is technically not a Nobel but an
award in honour of Alfred Nobel. Up to 2019, the Nobel
Prizes plus the Prize in Economic Sciences have been awarded 597 times. Regarding
literature, including 2020 nominations, 112
persons have so far been decorated ‘Nobel Laureates.’
The
information in public domain is that three different bodies i) the Royal
Swedish Academy appoints its own members to committees for the Nobels in
Physics, Chemistry, Literature, and Economics, ii) the Karolinska Institutet, a
Swedish medical university, selects the names for the Physiology and Medicine
prize and for the Peace Prize, iii) the Norwegian
Nobel Committee, appointed by the
Norwegian Parliament, handles the matter.
To
any one accessing the details from the official website of the Nobel Prizes, the
whole exercise would appear really daunting. The Nobel Committee commences the
exercise by sending out letters with nomination forms to hundreds of
individuals and organizations qualified to nominate candidates, latest by 31st
January, for consideration. By April, perhaps from out of a large pool of nominations
received, a preliminary short listing to 15- 20 names is made by the committee for
the consideration of the Swedish Academy. Further exercises are rolled out up
to May to whittle down the list to ‘five priority’ candidates. The members of
the Academy have to go through produced materials pertaining to each of the
priority candidates to make considered assessments and prepare individual
reports on each of the finalized five. After completion of this June- August
exercise, the Academy members confer and discuss the merits of candidates and
their contributions in September. For peace prize, nominators are not generally
invited, but the nominators have to be members or advisors of the committee,
previous Nobel laureates and people working in relevant fields (social
sciences, peace research, etc.), national politicians, or members of
international courts. By early October the candidate for each award is chosen by
the Academy (by majority, receiving more than half of the votes cast) and
announced.
There is claim of
strict confidentiality in the Committee inviting qualified people to nominate
potential winners. The nominations are generally
kept a secret for 50 years. On that score, the public now have access to
nominations/nominators from 1901-1969. The nominators generally consist of members of
the academy or institute itself, members of the relevant Nobel committee, past
Nobel laureates in the field. Moreover the list of nominators from academia is regionally
limited to ‘tenured professors from Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, and
Norway, department chairs from elsewhere, and other scientists or presidents of author societies’.
After
all, the consideration and confirmation of the awardees are the work of
fallible humans and so on several occasions, awards, and particularly awards
for literature, are shrouded with accusations including Eurocentrism, sexism,
favouritism and such. On many occasions better individuals have been ignored
and not-much known candidates have been awarded. The selection of the laureate
for literature has become controversial since the very first award in 1901. This
year also the choice of the 77 year old American Poet Loiuse Gluck, a
Professor of English at Yale and a resident of Cambridge, Massachutes, for
Literature Prize is quite unexpected. Though she
had made her debut some fifty two years ago with her first collection
(Firstborn 1968), she is “not more well known outside the U.S borders” according
to Nobel Committee’s Chair, Anders Olsson. Her works have not been translated
into many other languages. To be fair, it must be accepted that though an
unexpected choice, there is no great controversy about her selection.
Had it been normal, the Nobel Prize winners (except Peace Prize winners) will attend at Stockholm a high profile award ceremony (White tie ceremony)in December wherein the Swedish Royalty will honour them with an exquisitely designed Diploma, an elegantly carved heavy gold medal and a document confirming their award money (more than 93 000 U.S Dollars now). The ceremony will normally be followed by a lavish banquet. But this year due to the pandemic, the award ceremony is already cancelled.
(to
be continued)
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