Nobel Prize For Literature 2022: As the Nobel Prize season was kick-started on Monday, the much-awaited Nobel Prize for literature has entered the debates among bibliophiles again. The 2021 Nobel laureate was awarded to Tanzanian-born British novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”. It is difficult to know what is on the Nobel Committee’s mind as the nominees are kept secret for 50 years until the nominees themselves make public announcements.Also Read – As Nobel Season Begins, Here Are 5 Things To Know About The Prestigious Prizes
As for literary culture in English speaking world gets much glory with the Nobel Prize, there are criticisms against the Nobel Committee that gives primacy to English language novels centered in Europe for the prize.
Here is a list of novelists that we think have been long ignored by the Nobel committee for the prestigious award.
THESE 11 AUTHORS DESERVE THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE:
1. Mircea Cartarescu
Romanian novellist, story-writer and essayist, Cartarescu is a quentesential product emerged from the repression of a surveillance society. With 25 books translated into 23 languages, he is one of the most prominent and prolific writers in post-communist Romania.
2. Boubacar Boris Diop
Senegalese novelist, journalist and screenwriter, is best known work for his work, ‘Murambi, le livre des ossements’ (translated into English as Murambi: The Book of Bones), is the fictional account of a notorious massacre during the Rwandan genocide of 1994.
3. Cesar Aira
Argentinian writer who has around 100 stories and novels to his credit. His books are a chain of connections, rendered as a series of surreal, often hilariously absurd vignettes and reflect life as a series of chance encounters.
4. Ismail Kadare
Ismail Kadare is an Albanian novelist, poet, essayist, screenwriter, and playwright whose writings will take all over the world. His works are a masterful blend of myth and folklore with portraits of modern minds and local realities—plus a cunning, wry kind of humor.
5. Hwang Sok-yong
Hwang Sok-Yong is one of South Korea’s most renowned novelists. In 1993 Hwang was sentenced to seven years in prison for an unauthorized trip to North Korea to promote exchange between the two Koreas, and was released in 1998 on a special pardon. He is the recipient of many literary prizes in Korea and was shortlisted for the Prix Femina Estranger in France. His many novels include At Dusk, Familiar Things, and The Guest.
6. Adonis
Adonis is a Syrian poet who should probably have won by now. Let’s just say him not winning is like if T.S. Eliot had not won as they both have had great influence on revolutionary movements in their respective worlds of Arab writing and Anglophone writing.
7. Ngugi Wa’ Thiong’o
Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa’ Thiong’o decided to kill his reach by switching to writing in his native Gikuyu instead of in English. His tireless mission is to equalize power relations between languages and decolonize the literary landscape. We can also attest to his ability to make you both fall in love with, and hate Joseph Conrad, in the span of an hour. Read Wizard of the Crow or any of his memoirs.
8. Garielle Lutz
We think it is impossible for anybody to read American writer Garielle Lutz, and not feel the universe shift a little. Her sentences, on cursory glance, might seem obtuse. But they are deceptively so, in fact, simplifying the meaning of things in unexpected ways.
9. Jon Fosse
Norwegian writer Jon Fosse was Knausgaard’s teacher, whose advice and example, Knausgaard (by his own admission) did not follow. One of the most manageable pieces of work to start with can be Morning and Evening.
10. Shahrnush Parsipur
An Iranian novelist, not widely known but certainly not to be missed. Her work ‘Touba and the Meaning of Night’ is commendable, which she wrote after being imprisoned in Iran for four years. What many men take pages and pages to do, she does in just twenty, easily juxtaposing Sufi mysticism with the political and scientific.
11. Lazlo Krasznahorkai
Reading Hungarian writer Lazlo Krasznahorkai is a unique experience—it is as if his letters do not form words with meaning, but directly transcend meaning to form a picture that you may or may not understand. It is very hard to describe, but we recommend starting with Satantango, and following it up with Bela Tarr’s movie by the same name.
Some other honorable names that must be included in the list are Annie Ernaux, Anne Carson, Scholastique Mukasonga, Salim Barakat and many more. These are the people whose lives and lived realities shaped their writings in a manner which is otherworldly. Yet, they are somehow reflections of the world we live in.