Earlier this month when the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm announced that there would be two prizes of literature announced this year, the surprise was not really that two fine writers could look forward to the honour, one for 2019 and the other for 2018. The sense of disbelief was that the prize was going to be awarded at all this year.
Last year, the Swedish Academy had collapsed on itself in a heap of allegations, with solid trails of proof, ranging from serial sexual abuse to financial fraud and collusion with bookmakers. In what appeared to be more like the tense plot lines of a Netflix mini-series, the revelations had shattered the earlier mystique about The Eighteen (the members of the Swedish Academy that gives out the prize).
Fervent hope
Somehow the Nobel Foundation has been persuaded to support the Swedish Academy’s attempt to clean up its act, including with the appointment of external members to keep a check and new rules to expel compromised members. For all the reservations being expressed about the quick turnaround in Stockholm, I think it could work. And it’s not only because hastened speculation in advance of Literature Nobel Thursday in October has become part of readers’ biorhythm.
It’s that time of the year when book-lovers keep an eye on the London bookmakers’ odds (some, as it now turn out, with inside information). It’s when we individually take stock of our reading selves, to make informed choices about literary contributions that allow us to inhabit a civilisational space unlimited by our linguistic limitations. It’s that time of the year, above all, when our fervent hopes that a personal favourite will be honoured clash with the expectation about being nudged to read works by a great writer who has so far been outside our reading lives — as happened, in the former case, with Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk’s Nobel in 2006, and in the latter most recently with French novelist Patrick Modiano in 2014 and Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich in 2015.
Which is why, it is perfectly acceptable that the Academy would like to make amends for the absence last year by announcing prizes for 2018 and 2019. However, it would have been a far better recovery had the 2018 and 2019 prizes been awarded to the same person. The fact is that it is the winner of the Nobel who puts the shine on the award, not the awarders. It would be befitting for one person to accept collectively on behalf of her fellow writers globally the missing prize of 2018 to highlight this.
About Ahmet Altan
The moral force of the Nobel writers was highlighted once again this month upon the publication in English of writings from prison of Ahmet Altan, an influential Turkish journalist and writer. After the failed coup of July 2016 in Turkey, countless people from all walks of life were placed in detention by the regime of Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Among them were dozens of journalists and writers, the most prominent of them being Altan. After the life sentence to Altan, his economist brother Mehmet and journalist Nazli Ilicak, an open letter to Erdogan from 38 Nobel laureates formed the fulcrum of the global effort to not just try to win his release, but through the absurdity of his trial force the world to take note of the mass detentions against all norms of human rights.
I Will Never See the World Again collects Altan’s short writings in prison — they were taken out among the personal notes Altan would give his lawyers and translated by Yasemin Congar. Together, the essays are a manifesto of the writer, on how to always be true to storytelling. So, for example, amid the inhumane conditions of prison, he writes: “Anyone on earth who finds a listener has a story to tell. What is difficult to find is not the story, but the listener. I was the listener in that cage [prison cell].”
Or as he writes elsewhere: “Others may have the power to imprison me, but no one has the power to keep me in prison. I am a writer. I am neither where I am nor where I am not. Wherever you lock me up I will travel the world with the wings of my infinite mind.”
The writer has a greater place in the world today than ever before — the Literature Nobel must find a way to reflect that beyond the Academy’s administrative revamp.
Mini Kapoor is Ideas Editor, The Hindu.
