The US poet has won ‘for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal’
Thank you for joining us today for the liveblog. You can read the full story by Alison Flood here.
Related: Louise Glück wins the 2020 Nobel prize in literature
Born in 1943, Glück has written 12 collections of poetry and two book of essays. Her most recent collection was 2014’s Faithful and Virtuous Night. Over a career spanning six decades, she has explored trauma, death and healing, in poems that scholars have argued are both confessional and not. As Olsson, chair of the Nobel, said earlier: “She is not to be regarded as a confessional poet. She seeks universality.” (Some poets may dispute that being an either-or.)
“Don’t forget to read our marvellous laureate,” Olsson says cheerfully, before wrapping up the conference. Well that’s that!
The Guardian’s resident poetry expert, Carol Rumens, cast an eye over a poem from Glück’s most recent collection Faithful and Virtuous Night, back in 2014. You can read it below.
Related: Poem of the week: A Work of Fiction by Louise Glück
Explaining their decision, Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel committee says Glück’s voice “is candid and uncompromising and signals that this poet wants to be understood. She has humour and biting wit.
“Even if her autobiographical background is significant in her works, she is not to be regarded as a confessional poet. She seeks universality ... Three characteristics unite to reoccur in her works: the topic of family life, an austere but also playful intelligence, and a refined sense of composition.”
This makes Glück the 16th woman to win:
Selma Lagerlof, 1909
US poet Louise Glück “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”
BREAKING NEWS:
The 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to the American poet Louise Glück “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”#NobelPrize pic.twitter.com/Wbgz5Gkv8C
The Japanese novelist is frequently high up in the odds – so much so that a group of diehard fans, also known as “Harukists”, tend to gather each year to watch the ceremony, tumblers of whisky (a motif in his novels) at hand. Japan’s love for Murakami is greater than that for even other Japanese contenders; when British-Japanese novelist Kazuo Ishiguro won in 2017, staff at Kinokuniya bookshop in Tokyo reportedly let out a groan before quickly disassembling their immaculate Murakami display and replacing it with Ishiguros.
With more than 100 books to her name, Joyce Carol Oates is rarely far from the adjective “prolific”. Novels, short stories, plays, poetry and criticism have poured from her in an unbroken stream since her debut collection of short fiction was published in 1963. Ranging across genre from thriller to romance and from horror to literary fiction, Oates has explored class, race, gender and the violence of modern society in novels such as Them (1969), Because it is Bitter and Because it is My Heart (1990), Blonde (2000) and The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007).
We’re just 10 minutes away - you can watch the video at the top of this liveblog (you may need to refresh your browser if you joined us a while back). Enjoy watching some journalists looking nervous.
Fiammetta Rocco, culture correspondent at the Economist and the administrator of the International Booker prize, knows what she’s talking about when it comes to international literature. Her tips are first, Maryse Condé, “whose work just resonates more and more powerfully as time goes by”, and second, “my fellow Kenyan, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, for a lifetime of highly original writing, but especially for The Perfect Nine, which is published today. An epic in every sense of the word.”
Just as the same names come up each year, so to does the video of Doris Lessing finding out that she had won, from back in 2007. But it is too good not to share every time.
Whoever wins #NobelPrize for literature tomorrow, they will never beat this reaction by Doris Lessing.pic.twitter.com/IU50xp0Vvj
Another perennial contender is the Hungarian novelist, playwright and essayist Péter Nádas. He is best known internationally for his 700-page novel A Book of Memories, which divides the story of a young Hungarian writer growing up under communism between three narrators. When it was published in English in 1997, Eva Hoffman compared it to Proust and Musil in the New York Times, praising Nádas’ exploration of memory “in profligate and fantastically modulated detail, all the compressed meanings, the swirl and buzz of sensation and impression implicit in even the most mundane moments”. Susan Sontag hailed it as “the greatest novel written in our time, and one of the great books of the century”.
One of the most powerful and distinguished storytellers of our time: Toni Morrison, became the first African American woman to be awarded a #NobelPrize when she received the Literature Prize in 1993.
Stay tuned to find out the recipient(s) of the 2020 Literature Prize! pic.twitter.com/QyDDPbpnb0
The Nobel Prize has just tweeted this. Does this mean we might see another black female laureate this year? Morrison remains the only black woman to win the prize since it was first awarded in 1901.
Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel prize in literature, has given a little video interview to the people running the Nobel Twitter account. No insights about who they’re likely to announce, but there was one particularly intriguing snippet. Asked how Covid-19 has affected the committee’s work, Olsson says that things have “continued according to plan”.
“The only thing that has changed is of course our ways of meeting and communicating with one another. We have communicated more with secret codes and so forth and less physical meetings. I think everyone has experienced this,” says Olsson, failing to give any more detail about these secret codes and leaving me to believe that they have code names for all contenders, which I am now desperate to discover.
Yan Lianke has also been named as a possibility. The widely acclaimed Chinese novelist and short story writer has been given odds of 12/1 at Ladbrokes - he feels like a solid option. Some of his novels, which tend towards experimental, have been banned in China - The Day the Sun Died, which has been seen as a political critique of Xi Jinping’s “Chinese dream”, had to be published first in Taiwan.
Related: Yan Lianke: ‘The situation for writers in China is complex’
Jacques Testard has form for picking - and publishing - Nobel winners. His small publisher, Fitzcarraldo Editions, is home to both Svetlana Alexievich and Olga Tokarczuk.
“I suspect it’ll be a woman, one of the names most bandied around these last few days – Anne Carson, Jamaica Kincaid, Can Xue,” says Testard. “If it isn’t, I hope it’ll be a non-European. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o would be fantastic, overdue. Carlos Fuentes predicted César Aira would win in 2020 – he’d be a great choice. One of our authors is convinced it’ll be a Russian this year, which could mean Ludmila Ulitskaya, or Mikhail Shishkin. But ultimately your guess is as good as mine.”
The Canadian poet, translator and classicist is also a new tip, thanks to Björn Wiman, culture editor at Swedish paper Dagens Nyheter, who doesn’t think the Swedish Academy will be put off by the fact that another Canadian, Alice Munro, won not so long ago (2013). The first woman to have won the TS Eliot prize for poetry, Carson is the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, and has also won prizes including the Griffin poetry prize.
Jamaica Kincaid, the Antiguan-American author who is seen as one of the Caribbean’s leading writers, is one new name doing the rounds this year. Kincaid was born in St John’s, Antigua as Elaine Potter Richardson, leaving Antigua at the age of 16 to work as an au pair in New York. She changed her name in 1973, partly for anonymity as she began writing stories for the New Yorker. From The Autobiography of My Mother to Annie John, her novels explore the Caribbean and family relationships, in particular those between mothers and daughters, and provide a fierce critique of colonialism. Her memoir My Brother was about her half-brother’s death from Aids.
Richard Osman is taking no chances: after publishing his first novel, The Thursday Murder Club, earlier this autumn, he’s placed a tenner on himself landing the Nobel. The odds, he revealed on his Instagram, were 100/1. Not bad. “I mean, you never know, right?” wrote the comedian.
One of Russia’s leading contemporary novelists and short story writers, and a vocal advocate for freedom of expression, Lyudmila Ulitskaya began her writing career after she was sacked as a scientist in the 1960s, and accused of dissident activity by Soviet authorities for translating a banned American book into Russian. She holds the record for nominations for the Russian Booker prize, having been nominated five times and winning once (making her the first woman to win). In novels and collections such as The Funeral Party, Sonechka, Daniel Stein, Interpreter, and The Big Green Tent, she has explored the role of women in Russian domestic and public life, state surveillance, the intimacy and love found in non-traditional families, and faith.
Related: Lyudmila Ulitskaya: why I'm not afraid of Vladimir Putin
Guadeloupean novelist Maryse Condé has very short odds this morning (not that that always helps you win the Nobel). She was the first and only winner of the New Academy prize in literature in 2018, a one-off award intended to fill the void left by the cancellation of the Nobel.
Last year, Anders Olsson, chair of the prize, said the jury needed to “widen our perspective”, given that the award’s previous two winners, Kazuo Ishiguro and Bob Dylan, were both men writing in English. “We had a more Eurocentric perspective on literature and now we are looking all over the world,” he said. “Previously it was much more male-oriented. Now we have so many female writers who are really great, so we hope the prize and the whole process of the prize has been intensified and is much broader in its scope.”
However, the jury ended up choosing two more Europeans – Austria’s Peter Handke and Poland’s Olga Tokarczuk. WIll this change this year?
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the Nobel prize in literature, which, in the words of my colleague Alison Flood earlier this week, “sees itself as the world’s pre-eminent literary award”, and will be announced at 12pm BST (1pm CEST).
Who will win is always a mystery - albeit a mystery with a recurring cast of contenders, with the occasional surprise (hey Bob Dylan, 2016’s Nobel laureate! Hey, you!) thrown in. Names tipped this year include the Guadeloupean novelist Maryse Condé, Russian writer Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Antiguan-American writer Jamaica Kincaid and Canadian poet Anne Carson. (Lots of women – we’ll get to that later.) In addition, there are the perennial big-name favourites who should have their speeches tucked away already – such as Japanese bestseller Haruki Murakami, Canadian author Margaret Atwood and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the Kenyan novelist, poet and playwright.
Continue reading...
0 comments:
Post a Comment