This has not been just another October, not any other year, in the literary world, or in other worlds, of course.
But, despite the fact that the cancellations of festivals, fairs and meetings of the book sector continue to fill the
non-calendar
of the pandemic since March, tomorrow will be one of the most anticipated and important annual appointments, the most
pop
moment
of the world, so general, ancient bookish universe.
The verdict of the Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced on Thursday by Professor Anders Olsson, president of the Swedish Academy, at 1:00 p.m. by videoconference, as has happened on other occasions.
Although in the fall of 2020 there has been no occasion to spread rumors or speculate about who will win the highest literary award in the halls of the Frankfurt Fair, the cabal have not disappeared at all.
At the Ladbrokes bookmaker, the writer Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe, 83 years old) headed this Wednesday morning the list of favorites followed closely by Liudmila Ulítskaya (Russia, 77 years old).
Condé, author of the two-volume novel
Segou
and whose last work translated into Spanish this year is
Life without makeup
(Impedimenta), received the Alternative Nobel Prize in 2018, which is also awarded in December in Stockholm a few days before the delivery of the official Nobel.
That year, 2018, was the same year in which the Swedish Academy - involved in a sexual scandal and leaks of the names of the winners that led to the resignation of several of its members - chose not to fail the award and undertake a process of reflection and changes.
For this reason, last October, the announcement of the Nobel Prize was double and included the 2018 prize, which went to the Polish Olga Tokarczuk - a name that, together with that of the Russian Ulítskaya, sounded among the favorites to obtain the award.
The Nobel Prize for Literature goes to the final
Writers vs. Peter Handke
But the cloud of controversy was not cleared, since in addition to Tokarczuk the other winner, who collected the 2019 award, was the Austrian playwright and writer Peter Handke.
His name had been mentioned many times among Nobel candidates, but experts considered it impossible for him to receive it because of his positions of support for the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia.
A toxic halo seemed to surround Handke and the failure of the Nobel confirmed it: from the moment it was made public that he had been awarded, authors such as Joyce Carol Oates and Salman Rushdie expressed their rejection, as well as the writers' organization PEN.
The protests continued until the award ceremony itself in December in Stockholm, when an academic boycotted the ceremony.
The Swedish press described what happened as a clear example of how you can “sink a brand”, in this case that of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
All these antecedents suggest that in 2020 the award will go to a person of recognized prestige and who does not cause controversy.
Also that, in these times of review of faults, the jury may try to compensate for gender and nationality imbalances, since the number of women awarded to date has been only 15.
The Nobel has served to introduce unknown authors to the general public (to cite one example, the Austrian Jelinek had barely sold 1,300 copies of her plays in the United States and exponentially multiplied sales in the two months after the announcement of the Nobel).
But the Swedish Academy Award has also served as a social and political thermometer, in an attempt to maintain its relevance and echo.
If the wind that blows today is that of the end of globalization, it would be expected that the Nobel prize will be received by some Scandinavian, and if what is heard is the protest against racial and gender discrimination and discrimination, the award would travel further.
Good, very good writers, there are many in the world.
The range of possibilities is wide and ranges from the Canadians Margaret Atwood, the famous novelist author of
The
Handmaid's
Tale
, to the renowned and distinguished poet Anne Carson, past the Japanese Murakami, the British Hilary Mantel or the South Korean poet Ko A.
Also on the classic lists are candidates such as the Spanish Javier Marías, the Czech Milan Kundera and the Norwegian Jon Fosse.
Other names that sound strong are that of the Kenyan Ngugi Wa Thiong'o who visited Barcelona in 2019, and the Israeli David Grosman.
The great Syrian poet, Adonis, is joined by the Mexican Homero Aridjis on the Ladbrokes lists.
The list of authors who have not received the Nobel (Nabokov, Borges and more recently John Ashberry) is almost as (or even more) staggering than those who have, including great authors and also many other writers who they have fallen into oblivion.
The discussions and mysteries around the Nobel have given and continue to give a lot of themselves, without having to resort to the now classic debate that started in 2016 on whether Bob Dylan should have received it or not.
By the way, there are no longer troubadours on the list and Philip Roth died without abandoning that of eternal Nobel candidates.
This is how the Nobel is failed
The Swedish Academy is in charge of the selection of candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature and has 18 members.
The Nobel Committee for Literature is the body that evaluates nominations and makes its recommendations to the Academy, and is made up of four or five members.
In this committee, chaired by Professor Anders Olsson are the writers Per Wästberg and Jesper Svenbro and three external specialists Mikaela Blomqvist, Rebecka Kärde and Henrik Petersen have joined.
The deadline for submitting nominations, which can be made by other winners, other academies and teachers, opens in September and ends on January 31.
In April 15-20 candidates remain and in May the list is only five, selected by the committee.
June, July and August are used to read the work of these finalists and in September the members of the Academy deliberate and discuss.
In October it is announced and in December it is delivered.