Nobel Prize nominations, 1964

       I mentioned the opening of the 1964 Nobel Prize archives (fifty years is how long they wait before making them accessible) last week, with some of the basics revealed in the first press-reports. Now, finally, the Nobel Prize site has updated their wonderful archive to include 1964 and so the full list of Nobel Prize in Literature nominations - 1964 is finally freely available.

       76 candidates were named in 98 nominations, including 19 first-timers.

       Among the nominees were: (future winners in italics with [year of win]; number of nominations in 1964, if multiple, in (parentheses)):

• Jean Anouilh
• Miguel Ángel Asturias [1967]
• W.H.Auden (2)
• Samuel Beckett [1969] (2)
• Jorge Luis Borges
• André Breton (2)
• Martin Buber (2)
• Heinrich Böll [1972]
• Camilo José Cela [1989]
• Paul Celan (2)
• Heimito von Doderer
• Lawrence Durrell
• Friedrich Dürrenmatt (3)
• Max Frisch
• Romulo Gallegos
• Jean Giono (2)
• Robert Graves
• Taha Hussein (2)
• Eyvind Johnson [1974]
• Ernst Jünger
• Kawabata Yasunari [1968]
• Miroslav Krleža
• Robert Lowell
• André Malraux
• Harry Martinson [1974]
• W. Somerset Maugham
• Mishima Yukio
• Henry de Montherlant
• Alberto Moravia
• Vladimir Nabokov
• Pablo Neruda [1971]
• Katherine Anne Porter
• J.B.Priestley
• Nelly Sachs [1966]
• C.P.Snow
• Mikhail Sholokhov [1965] (2)
• Tanizaki Jun'ichirō
• Giuseppe Ungaretti
• Arthur Waley
• Mika Waltari
• Tarjei Vesaas
• Thornton Wilder (2)

       1964 laureate Jean-Paul Sartre was named in two nominations -- one of them the Swedish PEN Club; he had been named in a total of fourteen nominations in previous years.

       Interesting odds and ends:

• Future laureate (and, as Swedish Academy member, insider) Harry Martinson was the big Japan-supporter, the man who nominated three of the four Japanese authors -- the three novelists, Kawabata, Mishima, and Tanizaki
  
  
• Both Martinson and his co-laureate to-be Eyvind Johnson were both nominators and nominees in 1964
  
  
• Patrick White would go on to be the first Australian Nobel laureate, but before he was ever even nominated poet Judith Wright was -- getting two nominations in 1964.
  
  
• Amélie Nothom's great-grandfather Pierre Nothomb was a nominator in 1964 -- nominating ... Jacques Pirenne. (Not one of the all-time great nominations .....)
  
  
• Persian author Hossein Ghods-Nakhai is well-known for his writing, but probably better known as Iranaian ambassador to the US and later the Vatican, and Minister of Foreign Affairs; he was also nominated in 1964
  
  
• Pity, perhaps, Tarjei Vesaas -- who would have been a worthy winner, too (consider The Ice Palace): this was his twenty-fifth nomination !

       With ten future winners (including the next five) among the nominees, and including authors who would never win the prize such as Borges and Nabokov, this was certainly a loaded field.
       And I still say Sartre was a good choice (including the way things turned out).