The Swedish panel that awards the Nobel Prize for Literature isn’t biased toward European writers or against US writers, a member of the panel said.
Nationality isn’t an important factor in selecting the prize winner, Swedish Academy member and acclaimed poet Kjell Espmark said on Wednesday. Other members of the Swedish Academy have suggested both biases exist.
In 2008, the committee’s then-permanent secretary, Horace Engdahl, said European writers tend to beat out US writers because US literature is overly insular. In 2009, his successor, Peter Englund, worried the prize was too “Eurocentric.”
The past 20 laureates includes one American — novelist Toni Morrison, in 1993 — and 11 European writers, including German novelist Gunter Grass and British playwright Harold Pinter. Some of the others selected during that time are not from Europe, but have spent much of their writing careers there.
The literature prize election is by secret ballot among the 18 members of the Swedish Academy. Espmark has been a member of the Academy since 1981.
Engdahl sparked an uproar in 2008 when he declared in an interview that Europeans tend to win because they deserve to win, particularly compared with Americans, whom he dismissed as “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture.”
Engdahl’s words were taken out of context, Espmark said on Wednesday.
“That interview was summed up in such a way that could make you think that American writers were out of the question because they were too insular and so on. That’s just nonsense,” he said. “What he talked about actually is that very little translated literature is read in America.”
Very few foreign-language books make it into English, especially in the US market, and even fewer reach a wide audience, he said.
He also said he disagreed with Englund when he revealed in 2009 that he thought it was a problem that members of the Swedish Academy tend to “relate more easily to literature written in Europe and in the European tradition.”
“The nation is not important, and balance [of laureates’ homelands] is not interesting,” Espmark said, noting that the panel tries to be impartial and make selections based purely on literary criteria.
Espmark, who is a professor emeritus of literary history at Stockholm University, was in Rhode Island as part of a tour to promote his latest collection of poetry, Lend Me Your Voice. He gave a lecture at Providence College and read from the poetry collection, speaking to reporters afterward.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.