The Nobel Prize in Literature is award for outstanding contributions in the field. The first ever award was handed out back in 1901 when Frenchman Sully Prudhomme walked away with the inaugural honour. The esteemed Swedish Academy will announce the prize winner on Thursday, October 8th who will go down in the annals of history amongst some all time greats. There is a prominent list of contenders out so there is only question remaining: who will win the Nobel prize in Literature 2015?
Former Nobel Literature Winners
The list of laureates who have claimed the honour include John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, T. S. Eliot and Sir Winston Churchill who was awarded the prize in 1953 for his for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values”. It’s almost like a who’s-who of the greatest writers of all time, but the award has had its critics for the criteria under which it worked whichwas based in looking at “idealistic”writiner, which naturally eliminated some of history’s other greatest writers. Now the criteria has been relaxed somewhat in looking for lasting literary merit as well as evidence of consistent idealism.
France are the leaders when it comes to having produced Nobel laureates, with 15 winners of the award, following jointly by the United States and the United Kingdom, which have produced 10 each. However the most successful language has been English with 30 wins, followed by French with 16 and German with 13 and the Spanish at 11. Those are the only languages having made it into double figures.
2014 Nobel Literature Winner
It was another French winner in 2014 with novelist Patrick Modiano being awarded the title being called the “Marcel Proust of our time”. Proust was one of those great writers who missed out on the prize because of the early criteria under which the Swedish Acadamy made their selections.
Who will win the nobel prize in literature 2015?
Heading up the market for Nobel Prize in Literature Winner is Svetlana Alexievich at a price of 5/1 with online betting site Ladbrokes. Alexievich is a Belarusian investigative journalist and famed for her books The Boys of Zinc on the Afghan war and Voices from Chernobyl. It could be a big shift for the Nobel committee to hand over the award to the Belarusian because it would be an acknowledgement on their part that “nonfiction writing” is actually literature.
It has been more than 50 years since a nonfiction writer has won the prize. So yes, it has been handed over before with the second winner being a historian and essayist Theodor Mommsen. You can look at Churchill and his work was non-fiction and highly acclaimed but it has been a long time since recognition has gone that way.
Her main challenger in this year’s field for the $1.1 million Nobel Literature prize is renowned Japanese author Haruki Murakami. Followers of the Nobel literature prize will have seen Murakami’s name come up before as his supporters have long claimed that he is due for the recognition that the award brings. Books like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore and IQ84 have had the acclaimed Japanese author in the limelight for some time.
Literary critics have also been throwing forth support for the Swedish Academy to send the award to an African writer and that has Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong’o in the picture, and with the Academy seemingly having a bit of a penchant to send the award recently to relatively unknown authors to the English-speaking world, there may be outside value on Thiong’o. Only one of the last seven writers to win the prize has done so for work in English.
Online betting site Ladbrokes have put up 46 writers in their book for Nobel prize for literature 2015 betting with American novelist Philip Roth the only other contender in single figures at 8/1.
It is a huge tradition, a huge prize and a huge honor for the winner. Over a century ago Alfred Nobel left that famed will and testament that all of his money should be used to honour those people who have the “greatest benefit on mankind” in physics, chemistry, peace, physiology or medicine, and literature. Who will be next in line to take the title of Nobel laureate?
