The Hans Christian Andersen Litteraturpris -- not (sigh) to be confused with the Hans Christian Andersen Award -- has announced its 2016 award-winner (though not yet at the official site, last I checked ...), and it's ... Murakami Haruki; see The Japan Times report, Murakami joins ranks of Rowling, Rushdie in winning Danish literary prize.
This relatively new prize -- Murakami is only the fifth winner of what is now a biennial prize -- is the most unabashedly populistic of the better-known international author prizes, with a line-up of previous winners made up of: Paulo Coelho (2007), J.K.Rowling (2010), Isabel Allende (2012), and Salman Rushdie (2014).
I suspect this honor doesn't do much -- indeed, is more likely to severely undermine -- whatever Nobel chances and hopes Murakami had: the nearby Swedish Academy is bound to take note, and it's hard to believe they would give the prize to anyone in such award-winner company (Rushdie was a contender through about 1994, and still deserves some feigned consideration for his admirable free-speech support, but the quality of his fiction over the past two decades surely has put him far out of any serious Nobel-running; as to Coelho, Allende, and Rowling ... well, their writing ... says it all, doesn't it ?).
This relatively new prize -- Murakami is only the fifth winner of what is now a biennial prize -- is the most unabashedly populistic of the better-known international author prizes, with a line-up of previous winners made up of: Paulo Coelho (2007), J.K.Rowling (2010), Isabel Allende (2012), and Salman Rushdie (2014).
I suspect this honor doesn't do much -- indeed, is more likely to severely undermine -- whatever Nobel chances and hopes Murakami had: the nearby Swedish Academy is bound to take note, and it's hard to believe they would give the prize to anyone in such award-winner company (Rushdie was a contender through about 1994, and still deserves some feigned consideration for his admirable free-speech support, but the quality of his fiction over the past two decades surely has put him far out of any serious Nobel-running; as to Coelho, Allende, and Rowling ... well, their writing ... says it all, doesn't it ?).