Curious Literary Nobels

The Nobel Prize for Literature was instituted in 1901. To date, it has been awarded to 116 persons. Notable winners (in chronological order) are, Kipling, Maeterlinck, Tagore, Rolland, Hamsun, (Anatole) France, Yeats, Shaw, Bergson, Mann, (Sinclair) Lewis, Galsworthy, Pirandello, O'Neill, (Pearl) Buck, Hesse, Gide, T. S. Eliot, Faulkner, Russel, Mauriac, Churchill, Hemingway, Camus, Pasternak, Steinbeck, Sartre, Sholokhov, Beckett, Solzhenitsyn, Neruda, Bellow, Singer,  Marquez, Golding, Morrison, Heaney, Grass, Naipaul, Coetzee, Pinter, Pamuk & Dylan.

These 43 writers comprise only 37% of the total 116, the remaining 63% returning to oblivion. Pasternak was forced by his country to reject the Prize, but his "Dr. Zhivago" was made into an epic movie. Sartre himself rejected the Prize. Theroux, Naipaul's protégé turned foe, writes amusingly how when every year the Literature Nobel was announced, Sir Vidia would throw a tantrum until finally in 2001 he got one!

The greatest furore was created when in the first year, 1901, Tolstoy was not given. So for the next 5 years, 1902-6, he was nominated, but never awarded! This, for (arguably) the greatest writer of all time, writing the greatest novel of all time, "War & Peace"!

How wrong can human judgement go?