The Nobel Prize is one of the most coveted honors that can be received. The mere thought of being a Nobel winner sends chills down aspirants’ spines and makes them drift off into lovely daydreams . . . yes, I’ve had those daydreams and I know what they look like. Once you are chosen to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, you know that you have truly made your mark on the whole world, and not just a small portion of it.
When Alfred Nobel outlined the criteria for nominees for this award, he said, in part, that the prize was for “the most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency.” This phrasing, taken from the original Swedish, could also be read as “an ideal tendency,” and so as years have passed, the Academy has become more lenient with the political leanings of the nominees, whereas in the first several decades since its inception, the Academy was more strict about content and the ramifications of it.
How are authors nominated? At the beginning of the year, the Nobel Academy sends out an annoucement, to which former nominees, literature professors, and writers’ organizations all respond. They submit names of authors they feel best represent the high ideals spoken of by Nobel, and those names are gathered up by February 1st. The Academy is then responsible to winnow the list down to twenty names, and after much deliberation, down to five. Then the Academy undertakes careful research to study each author’s works in detail, and by October, the nominee who has received more than fifty percent of the vote is named the Nobel Laureate in Literature. It certainly has a ring to it, doesn’t it?
In 1901, the first winner of the award was Sully Prudhomme, a French author. Since then, winners have been selected from Germany, Norway, Spain, Poland, the United States, England, Ireland, Belguim, Russia – the list goes on. In more recent years, we’ve had winners from Greece and Nigeria. This is a truly international award, encompassing all people and all languages.
I was delighted to see Pearl S. Buck on the list of recipients, as she is one of my favorite authors. Other names we easily recognize are T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison, Gunter Grass, and John Steinbeck. I was ashamed to admit that the vast majority of winners were unfamiliar to me, but I plan to rectify that.
In addition to the fame that goes along with such an honor, the winner receives a gold medal, an invitation to speak at the award ceremony, and ten million kroner, which translates into $185775.6874 dollars, at the current rate of exchange.
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The Caldecott Medal and The Man For Whom It Was Named