In continuation of our discourse last week and perhaps shortly before the ink got dry from writing it, The New Academy, the one promoting the prize it has decided to call ‘The Alternative Nobel’, released a list of 47 writers which it said are on its list in the race for its prize. Don’t forget the prize is to bridge the gap for the absence of the Nobel Prize in Literature this year.
A part of me is excited at the release of the list, while the other is not. The reason is simple: the list falls into the same routine of listing western writers and adding a few sprinkles of other nationalities just to give it that ‘international’ look and acceptance.
On the long list are Ngugi wa Thiong’o, our own Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Nnedi Okorafor. Of course the remaining are Marilynne Robinson, Haruki Murakami, Cormac McCarthy, Joyce Carol Oates, JK Rowling, Don DeLillo, Ian McEwan, Jamaica Kincaid, Margaret Atwood, Thomas Pynchon, Arundhati Roy, Donna Tartt, Zadie Smith, and Elena Ferrante.
Let me try and do a little bit about the ones listed here. I agree that 47 is rather long. The few here are the popular ones and so I am going to write a little about each of them, at least the little I know about them. Marilynne Robinson is an American writer who has received many awards, so is Jacob Carol Oates, another American who has published over 40 novels, as well as plays, novellas, short stories and poems.
Another American is Cormac McCarthy, also a novelist, playwright, and screenwriter with about 10 novels. Don DeLillo is also American; a novelist, playwright and essayist, whose writings are diverse and cover many subjects.
Information available on Jamaica Kincaid, says she is an Antiguan-American novelist and essayist. Thomas Pynchon, a MacArthur Fellow, is also a novelist whose writings are said to be deep and complex. So is Donna Tartt, whose novel, The Goldfinch, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015. This is one of America’s most prestigious prizes.
The list, dominated by mostly American writers, also has Elena Ferrante, said to be the pseudonym for an Italian novelist. His books have been translated into many languages. Of course there are other writers outside America that I am familiar with. There is Haruki Murakami, who is Japan’s biggest literary export. I have read excerpts of his books and I must confess that the reason why he has not won the Nobel is just one of those that remain a mystery to some of us. The same goes for Margaret Atwood, the matron of Canadian letters whose 1985 book Handmaid’s Tale continues to win critical acclaim. The Indian novelist Arundhati Roy’s appearance on the list is rather surprising. Since her first novel, God of Small Things, won the Booker Prize in 1997, she has remained out of the literary circuit until recently. Her new book has failed to attract much attention.
Zadie Smith, the British novelist, deserves her place. She is one of my favourites while her British counterpart JK Rowling, who also made the list and is in fact one of the world’s richest writers, is not so much on my reading list. My struggle to read her world-acclaimed Harry Porter failed perhaps because it was targeted at the young. The same happened to me when I tried to read her first adult novel, Casual Vacancy. That book suffered the same fate that Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient did. I didn’t read it to the end.
The appearance of Adichie and Okorafor is good. However, I think it is too soon. Ngugi, for me, is the most deserving but at the same time I ask why should he win an alternative and not the real one? This is because as the organisers have stated, a considered author must be a “writer of literary fiction who within the reader has entered the story of mankind in the world.” The writer must also have published at least “two works, one of which must be within the last ten years”
Ngugi with his rich and vast body of works is my choice. But the Nobel is more like it.
What do you think?