Literary Laureates
In an earlier post I referred to Hermann Hesse, and in dialogue with some of the readers I mentioned that he won the Nobel prize for Literature.
Well he’s not alone. There is a complete list of all the Laureates here, and I think it is very interesting. They have honoured everything from plays by Samuel Beckett, to novels by Rudyard Kipling, to speeches by Winston Churchill.
Of this list the I am currently reading a work called Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian. After about 100 pages it is pretty engrossing.
Has any one out there got something to say about this list? Who do think we’ll see on this list in the future?
1 Comment
It’s interesting, though, that many of the greatest writers have not been chosen. Probably because of political correctness. The Nobel Prize for Literature reminds me of the Booker Prize in that it always seems to go to the writer who expresses the current zeitgeist, rather than the more universalist one who tends to last the longest.