At his Att vara ständig weblog Swedish Academy point-man Peter Englund offers a few tiny clues about Årets långa lista -- this year's longlist for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
For one, there are the number of nominations: 195 eligible names were submitted, of which 48 are first-timers -- roughly in keeping with recent totals (last year: 210 names, of which 46 were new).
Rather disappointingly, only five previous laureates took advantage of their privilege of being allowed to nominate an author; I count (hastily, so maybe I'm off by one or two) twenty living laureates, so that's a pretty poor response rate.
Here's where it gets interesting, however: he mentions that there had been an increased effort to solicit nominations from US-based academics (was it Harold Bloom who nominated Mo Yan ... ?) -- and this year they made a special effort to ask Africa-based academics. Will that have an affect on who got nominated ? Put someone like Ayi Kwei Armah into play ? And does that include the Maghreb universities -- which, despite the Arab Spring, may well still be dominated by some rather reactionary literary thinking ?
For one, there are the number of nominations: 195 eligible names were submitted, of which 48 are first-timers -- roughly in keeping with recent totals (last year: 210 names, of which 46 were new).
Rather disappointingly, only five previous laureates took advantage of their privilege of being allowed to nominate an author; I count (hastily, so maybe I'm off by one or two) twenty living laureates, so that's a pretty poor response rate.
Here's where it gets interesting, however: he mentions that there had been an increased effort to solicit nominations from US-based academics (was it Harold Bloom who nominated Mo Yan ... ?) -- and this year they made a special effort to ask Africa-based academics. Will that have an affect on who got nominated ? Put someone like Ayi Kwei Armah into play ? And does that include the Maghreb universities -- which, despite the Arab Spring, may well still be dominated by some rather reactionary literary thinking ?