Nobel boss slams US writers

It looks like the greats of modern American writing, Don DeLillo, John Updike and Jonathan Franzen, to name but three, will not be receiving a Nobel prize for literature anytime soon. Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, the body which chooses the Nobel Prize for literature, has dismissed US writing as being "insular" and "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture".

Speaking to the Associated Press on the eve of the announcement of the Nobel medal for literature, he said of current American literature: "They don't translate [foreign books] enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining. Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the centre of the literary world."

Predictably this has gone down badly across the Atlantic. David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker magazine, suggested it was the Swedish Academy itself which was hampered by ignorance and bad taste. Some of the greatest, and most admired, writers of the past century were denied the Nobel Prize, he said – including several Europeans. "You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures.".

Harold Augenbraum, executive director of the US National Book Federation, was equally scathing. "Such a comment makes me think that Mr Engdahl has read little of American literature outside the mainstream and has a very narrow view of what constitutes literature in this age."

The Swedish Academy is expected to announce the 2008 winner of the €1m Nobel literary prize next week. The shortlist of five, though secret, is said to include two American novelists, Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates, but the British bookies Ladbrokes have the favourite as Italian Claudio Magris, whose best-known work is a philosophical and historical essay on the river Danube.

The comments have been interpreted in the US as meaning no American can expect to win while  Engdahl is in charge. The last US winner was Toni Morrison, in 1993, before he took over. Past US winners include John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway. 
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