The recent victory of Korean writer Han Kang is the latest in a series of unexpected literary Nobel prizes. Which ones have been the most discussed?
You bet on everything, even the Nobel prize winners for literature. And if many lose miserably every year, focusing on the world-famous writer, some lucky people get the most unexpected result, winning the title of literary critic and being able to say, this time really, “I’ve been reading it since before he won the Nobel Prize for literature”. This year the Swedish Academy has awarded Han Kang, a Korean writer published in Italy by Adelphi, for “her intense poetic prose that addresses historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”. A literary underdog in full, especially if you look at the names that the bookmakers had identified as eligible for the coveted prize: Can Xue, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Michel Houellebecq, Haruki Murakami. It should be added that in history only 17 women before her won the Nobel Prize for literature, never one coming from either South Korea or Asia.
In the last 30 years, there have been no lack of similar cases, let alone controversies about them.
2021: Who?! Abdulrazak Gurnah? I’ve never heard of him.
Since 2012 the prize has not been awarded to non-European or American authors, some had speculated that it was a win from outside the West. Yet the names on which we were certain were other, always the same from at least two editions: Annie Ernaux, Haruki Murakami, Margaret Atwood, Mircea Cărtărescu. It was the turn of Abdulrazak Gurnah to break the anathema: of Tanzanian origin, he was a professor of English and postcolonial literature at the University of Kent. Colonialism is a recurring theme in his novels, part of his personal lived, which was at the center of the motivation for the award of the Nobel: the Academy awarded it to him “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gap between cultures and continents”. Perhaps best known abroad, in Italy he was a complete stranger until three years ago: just think that you could find only one of his translated novels, The Defector, edited by Garzanti, and that there wasn’t even a Wikipedia page about him.
2016: Bob Dylan is a writer?
The press room of the Svenska Akademien breaks the austere ceremonial that permeates the Nobel and lets go to a roar of exultation: Bob Dylan, the minstrel of Duluth, won “for having created new poetic expressions within the great tradition of American song”. It’s the first time a singer has been awarded a Nobel, the first of a world-renowned underdog, alien to the most elite literary circles and perhaps closest to pop culture. Not that the other names were perfect mister nobody, being Philip Roth, Adonis, Jon Fosse and Haruki Murakami, the latter the real Jalisse of the literary Nobel. The approach of the Academy, considered by some too politically correct and radical chic for the choices always niche, is for the first time denied. What’s the matter? It has the exact opposite effect: a too political choice (they were the years of Trump against Clinton, with the singer-songwriter openly opposed to the first) and foreign to the world of literature in the strict sense. It is added that Dylan did not withdraw the prize until the following year (gesture considered by many extremely smug) and here served the most controversial edition of the history of the Nobel.
1997: Dario Fo. The left-wing homage to a jester
Anti-literary, unsympathetic, incomprehensible, plague-spreaders of high literature: accusations have poured out from all sides on the last Italian Nobel laureate who “following the tradition of medieval jugglers, disparaging power by restoring dignity to the oppressed”. There are intellectual intrigues and academic personalities who have defined, and still define, the victory of Dario Fo in 1997 as a real “mistero buffo”, a great machination of the left that the Nobel commission is interpreting. Then there were intellectuals who, although counted among the likely winners of that edition, did not spare criticism to those who attacked Fo: “it’s all smug. They do not know who he is”, said Umberto Eco in an interview with Repubblica. In October 1997, the last clash of intellectuals took place, perhaps with a figure at its center who discovered that he had won the most prestigious prize in the world while recording a TV programme in a car with Ambra Angiolini, thanks to a sign written by a motorist. More underdog than you can get.