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Nobel Literature Prize Speculation: Jon Fosse


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1 hour ago, Lady Winter Rose said:

Could someone explain how wife is guilty of husband's actions? Is member of the Swedish academy responsible for her husband actions? Did she participate in her husband's actions? What exactly did Sara Danius done?

Does anybody have answer or is Sara Danius just guilty for marrying wrong man?

Edited by Lady Winter Rose
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7 hours ago, Lady Winter Rose said:

Could someone explain how wife is guilty of husband's actions? Is member of the Swedish academy responsible for her husband actions? Did she participate in her husband's actions? What exactly did Sara Danius done?

 

6 hours ago, Lady Winter Rose said:

 

Does anybody have answer or is Sara Danius just guilty for marrying wrong man?

Okay, so it’s a pretty complicated story, but we should start off by clearing up that it isn’t Sara Danius who is married to the rapist; that would be Katarina Frostenson. Sara Danius’s only crime appears to have been being a female Permanent Secretary during this scandal. She was forced out mostly because of former Permanent Secretary and all around shitty human Horace Engdahl and his clique. See, Horace Engdahl is good buddies with Jean-Claude Arnault, the rapist, and in an attempt to take the heat off his rapist buddy old Horace decided to try to make this whole scandal a referendum on Danius’s leadership abilities. It’s gross, but then everyone has known for a very long time that Horace Engdahl is a supremely gross person, and yet the Swedish cultural scene still puts up with him.

As for Katarina Frostenson, there’s a little more there. During the course of the investigation it came out that Academy money was being misappropriated to subsidize a club that Frostenson and Arnault own. It also came out that Frostenson is the person who’s been leaking the names of Prize winners for the past decade or so. She would tell Arnault and then Arnault would tell his friends, and then they’d all presumably place bets on the winner. This all sounds relatively minor compared to the rapes Arnault committed, but the leaking of Prize winners names has been a hugely vexing problem for the Academy for years.

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  • 2 months later...

I'm surprised no one has posted in this thread since July with the announcement coming up in a month.

I've been looking a bit at a "Nobel Prizes in Literature 2019 Speculation" thread on the World Literature Forum. Lately the author they are mentioning most as a possibility seems to be the Portuguese novelist António Lobo Antunes.

https://groveatlantic.com/author/antonio-lobo-antunes/

The posters at World Literature seem sure at least one of the two winners will be a woman, but their speculation about possible women winners covers a very wide range.  The Egyptian writer Nawal El-Saadawi may be the most frequently mentioned, but many posters think the Nobel judges won't want to give a prize to someone so old this year (she's 87).

https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/biography-nawal-el-saadawi-sierra-hussey

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Antonio Lobo Antunes’ name has been kicked around for the past few years now. Most people thought his chances went down the drain when Jose Saramago won (he and Saramago were not friendly, and Antunes threw something of a hissy fit when Saramago was awarded the Prize), but it’s been more than 20 years now since Saramago’s victory, so Antunes is probably back in consideration.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Here's a not completely serious analysis by Alex Shephard in The New Republic. 

https://newrepublic.com/article/155316/will-win-2019-or-2018-nobel-prize-literature

and a somewhat more serious article by Jeva Lange:

https://theweek.com/articles/870077/favorite-author-isnt-going-win-nobel-prize

 

Maryse Conde seems to be a favorite of the moment, which I suppose means she probably won't win. We'll see soon. :)

 

 

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The Academy giveth: Olga Tokarczuk is a wonderful and well deserved recipient.

The Academy taketh away. Peter Handke is a disgrace. I'd rather a billion Bob Dylans get the award (and I'm on the record here as hating that) than an apologist for war criminals. He was a disgrace to most reasonable Austrians while I was living in Vienna in the mid-1990s. He's since been far worse. I'm pretty left wing...but even I can't defend this one.

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More than a bit disappointing to see both Prizes go to Europeans. Haven’t read either of them, but I did just buy Tokarczuk’s Flights a few weeks ago. The Academy really had a chance to do something exciting this year, and blew it. The choice to give it to Handke is mystifying, not least because it’s just courting controversy that the Academy really doesn’t need right now. If they were going to give one of the Prizes to Tokarczuk (who from everything I’ve heard, deserves it), why not finally recognize Ngugi with the other one? Or Hwang Sok-yong? Or Adunis? And if they were absolutely determined to give at least one of the Prizes to an old European man, it should have gone to Milan Kundera.

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Unlike the infamous Bob Dylan decision, which was basically a big fat FU to the entire US literary scene and as such a gesture as disgraceful and ignorant as possible in terms of acknowledgement of literary quality and importance, this years decision does at least recognize literary achievement. The decision for Handke is a bit surprising, but the academy was probably trying to play it safe in terms of of literary quality. The political controversy around Handkes pro-Serbian stance has very little to do with his work and as a Nobel prize for Literature (not Peace!) he deserves it for his work - at least if we consider who did and who didn't get this award. And most people (including the pretty graceless PEN America) do not question the quality of his work, but his political stance or rather, the reception of his travelogue " Eine winterliche Reise zu den Flüssen Donau, Save, Morawa und Drina oder Gerechtigkeit für Serbien".

The deserved criticism in terms of Literature is IMO that the academy continues its very eurocentric vision, I feel like they still owe the US a worthy NP winner

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I haven’t read Handke, but from everything I’ve heard, if we look at his body of work in a vacuum, he probably does deserve the Nobel on the merits of his writing. We do not however live in a vacuum, and there are dozens of writers who deserve the Nobel on the literary merits of their work. So why go with the genocide denier/apologist instead of Kundera, Ngugi, Antunes, DeLillo, Pynchon, Ko Un, Nawal El Saadawi, Marias, Atwood, Maraini, Farah, Kadare, Conde, Adunis, Desai, or Can Xue? Hell, if they wanted to stir up a little controversy, and still be on the right side of history, they could have given it to Rushdie. And anybody who’s been around this forum for a little while knows that I’m not the type of person who boycotts authors based on their personal awfulness. Knut Hamsun was a literal Nazi, and I still think everyone on the planet should read Hunger. I just don’t think we should be legitimizing Peter Handke’s voice by giving him the world’s most prestigious literary award. Especially when there are so very many other writers who are just as deserving of the award as he.

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Yeah, this does look a little like the controversy regarding Polanski winning the Oscar for the Pianist, except it isn't, because you don't have only other 4 options for specific work in one year, one of them being Rob freakin' Marshall,  another Stephen Daldry, and one being Scorsese for a minor work. They had every living writer and playwright to consider, or even pick someone outside the box like they did with Dylan. 

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23 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

I don't follow this much at all or read the kind of authors that get them (really should do more but yeah) but my dad's quite chuffed coz he knows Tokarczuk and tranlated her debut short story into English back when she was publishing pieces in Czas Kultury.

Off topic -- but this is the first time I've ever been exposed to the British slang word "chuffed." I'm surprised it means "very pleased" -- somehow the sound of it at first implied the opposite to me. :)

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