The novelist from Zanzibar has become the new laureate “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”
Alex Shephard at the New Republic always has wise thoughts to share about who the winner might be. This year, he believes Ernaux has a shot, as does Russian writer Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Thiong’o, Guadeloupean novelist Maryse Condé, Somali author Nuruddin Farah, and Chinese writer Can Xue.
“The prize has been awarded to Europeans 14 times this century – this despite the Nobel committee’s vocal emphasis on greater diversity and its quasi-public apologies for the prize’s well-earned reputation for Eurocentrism,” writes Shephard. “With this in mind, the likelihood of the next Nobel Prize in literature being awarded to a non-European and non-American should be exceedingly high. Should. For all the talk of righting this ship, however, it’s clear that the Nobel committee is going to do whatever it wants and that what it wants is to award a dour novelist writing lyrical reflections about an affair they had during World War II with a 15-year-old girl, preferably in French.”
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