How to Win the Nobel Prize

By Dan Piepenbring

 October 9, 2014

Reading the news about Patrick Modiano today, I was struck by the insipidness of the Nobel Foundation’s citation: “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation.” It bears all the hallmarks of an overblown blurb, one of those in which a bold, gimlet-eyed novelist is elucidating the now, or a limpid, singular poet is saying the unsayable. (Very few poets are saying the sayable these days, if our blurbs are to be believed.)

Vargas Llosa / ‘The Nobel prize is a fairytale for a week and a nightmare for a year’

 

Mario Vargas Llosa

A LIFE IN

Interview

Mario Vargas Llosa: ‘The Nobel prize is a fairytale for a week and a nightmare for a year’

This article is more than 12 years old

Stuart Jeffries

Friday 15 June 2012

The Peruvian Nobel laureate on winning literature’s biggest prize, his feud with Gabriel García Márquez and coming to accept that he is ‘not a politician’

By the time Mario Vargas Llosa got to Roger Casement's grave, he was already besotted. "He was a hero, very imperfect, very human and for me this made the character sympathetic. More than sympathetic," says the Nobel laureate at his publisher's offices in London. "But certain people find it hard to accept heroes who aren't perfect." At Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin, Vargas Llosa found the grave for the Irish patriot hanged by the British in 1916. "It was very sad because around him there are always flowers on the tombs of the leaders of the Irish rebellion, but on Casement's tomb there is not one flower.

 

Stark truths… Mt Halla, Jeju Island, Korea.

Photograph: LunaSimPhotography/Getty Images

Book of the day

Review

We Do Not Part by Han Kang review – a masterpiece from the Nobel laureate

One woman’s quest, told through haunting, harrowing, dreamlike imagery, bears witness to Korea’s traumatic 

Anne Enrigh

Thursday 6 February 2025

There are books in a writer’s life that gather all their previous themes and explorations in a great act of creative culmination, which both surpasses what had gone before and makes it more clear. We Do Not Part is one of those books. Published last year in Swedish translation, it helped to secure Korean writer Han Kang the 2024 Nobel prize in literature.

Jon Fosse

Interview

Nobel prize winner Jon Fosse: ‘It took years before I dared to write again’

In 2012, the Norwegian novelist and playwright collapsed. He gave up drinking, retreating from the public eye – then, earlier this month, he got a call from the Swedish academy. He discusses how it feels to win a Nobel prize

Chris Power
Saturday 28 October 2023

On the day this year’s Nobel prize in literature was announced, Jon Fosse went for a drive in the countryside outside Bergen to relax. “I was nervous before the announcement,” says the Norwegian playwright and author, with a laugh. He has been a fixture on bookies’ lists of Nobel favourites since 2013, so he felt, “you know, ‘It could be me.’ But I didn’t think it would be me.”

‘We are made of words’ / The radically intimate writing of Annie Ernaux

Annie Ernaux

‘We are made of words’: the radically intimate writing of Annie Ernaux

She offers us her own life, her own pain, without shame – and gives voice to the silences of women. For this the Nobel prizewinner deserves to be celebrated

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

Friday  7 October 2022

‘These things happened to me so that I might recount them,” Annie Ernaux writes in Happening, her slim retelling of the clandestine abortion she had in the 1960s, when the procedure was still illegal in France. “Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing. In other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.”

Annie Ernaux / The 2022 Nobel literature laureate’s greatest works

 

‘No triumphant displays of irony’ … Annie Ernaux. Photograph: Francesca Mantovani

Annie Ernaux: the 2022 Nobel literature laureate’s greatest works

Catherine Taylor
6 October 2022

Writer and critic Catherine Taylor explains how the French writer became the ‘great chronicler to a generation’

F

or once, the rumours have proved true. Annie Ernaux, the 82-year-old French writer, who for the last couple of years has been touted as a favourite, has been announced as the winner of the 2022 Nobel prize for literature – only the 17th woman out 119 laureates in the award’s history.

Abdulrazak Gurnah, posing from his home in Canterbury, England, following the Nobel Prize announcement

Can the Nobel Prize 'revitalize' African literature?

Abdularazak Gurnah is the fourth author from sub-Saharan Africa to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Is the tide turning for African writers?

Date 08.10.2021
Annabelle Steffes-Halmer

Two writers from sub-Saharan Africa are honored with prestigious literary prizes this month.

Abdulrazak Gurnah, an author who was born in Zanzibar and has lived in Britain since the late 1960s, is this year's Nobel Prize for Literature laureate. His award brings the total number of laureates from sub-Saharan Africa to receive the prestigious prize to four.

Abdulrazak Gurnah

Abdulrazak Gurnah: Out of Africa

Displacement and colonial scars inform the novels of the new Nobel laureate in literature

 Nandini Nair  | 08 Oct, 2021

ABDULRAZAK GURNAH TICKS many of the boxes that the top literature prize might seek to fulfil in 2021. Born in 1948, he could be labelled a Zanzibari writer, an East African writer, an African writer, a British writer. While he defies easy classification, his themes are always displacement, abandonment, identity and home. He is the first Black African writer in 35 years to win after Wole Soyinka’s 1986 glory.

 

Abdulrazak Gurnah, Tanzanian, writer, novelist, academic, portrait, Modena, Italy, 6th April 2006. (Photo by Leonardo Cendamo/Getty Images)

“The Nobel Returns Home”: Wole Soyinka on Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Nobel Prize Win

by CHUKWUEBUKA IBEH

October 07, 2021

The 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature has just been awarded to Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah. He is the seventh African to receive this honor.

The announcement was made earlier today October 7, 2021, after a closed-door deliberation by members of The Swedish Academy.

BOOK OF THE DAY

Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah review – living through colonialism

This compelling novel focuses on those enduring German rule in East Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century

Maaza Mengiste
Wed 30 Sep 2020 07.30 BST

U

ntil recently, most conversations about the European colonial presence in Africa have excluded Germany. Established in the late 19th century, the German empire on the continent included colonies in present-day Namibia, Cameroon, Togo, parts of Tanzania and Kenya, and eventually claimed the kingdoms of Rwanda and Burundi. German colonial rule was brutal, as colonial enterprises were; in an arena known for its oppression and violence, it is Germany that perpetrated the first genocide of the 20th century in the 1904 extermination campaign to quell the Herero and Nama uprising in Namibia. Across the continent in East Africa, or Deutsch-Ostafrika, Germany’s military tactics were equally deadly. Abdulrazak Gurnah’s sprawling yet intimate new novel Afterlives is set against the backdrop of these atrocities. Unfolding in what was then Tanganyika, now mainland Tanzania, it opens with a gentle and unassuming sentence: “Khalifa was twenty-six years old when he met the merchant Amur Biashara.”