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John Banville wins Austrian State Prize for European Literature

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       They've announced that John Banville erhält den Österreichischen Staatspreis für Europäische Literatur 2013, the €25,000 Austrian State Prize for European Literature that he'll pick up at the 25 July ceremony at the Salzburg Festival.
       The prize has a pretty awesome list of winners -- Premio Formentor winner Javier Marías got his in 2011, and other winners include Per Olov Enquist (2009), António Lobo Antunes (2000), Dubravka Ugrešić (1998), Giorgio Manganelli (1986), Stanisław Lem (1985), and Harold Pinter (1973) -- as well as folks like Kundera, Rushdie, Eco, Miroslav Krleža, and W.H.Auden.
       Limited to European authors, the prize is only limitedly international -- but, damn, for that it has a great track record, with a lot more hits than misses. One thing stands out, however: it's a miserable predictor for the Nobel Prize in Literature, even taking into account that it must miss a lot of winners (all those non-European ones): as best I can tell, only Pinter and 1981 winner Doris Lessing went on to win the Nobel. (All the more remarkable because they catch a lot of these authors pretty early on -- and, indeed, honored both Pinter and Lessing more than a quarter of a century before the Swedish Academy got around to it.)

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