It has been announced and it is . . . [drum roll please] Another author I have never read -- in fact, one I have never even heard of.
Somebody once told me (seriously) that the Nobel had been irrelevant since the year Garcia Marquez won ('82?), because he was a second-rate PC choice who nobody had ever heard of. I think this is and always has been a highly idiosyncratic process. I mean, look at their older choices. How many of them have stood the proverbial test of time?
???? You haven't reread Sully Prudhomme lately???? http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/ Here's the first 31 of the 20th century, i.e. the successors of 1901 Laureate Sully Prudhomme... 1933 - Ivan Bunin 1932 - John Galsworthy 1931 - Erik Axel Karlfeldt 1930 - Sinclair Lewis 1929 - Thomas Mann 1928 - Sigrid Undset 1927 - Henri Bergson 1926 - Grazia Deledda 1925 - George Bernard Shaw 1924 - Wladyslaw Reymont 1923 - William Butler Yeats 1922 - Jacinto Benavente 1921 - Anatole France 1920 - Knut Hamsun 1919 - Carl Spitteler 1918 - The prize money was allocated to the Special Fund of this prize section 1917 - Karl Gjellerup, Henrik Pontoppidan 1916 - Verner von Heidenstam 1915 - Romain Rolland 1914 - The prize money was allocated to the Special Fund of this prize section 1913 - Rabindranath Tagore 1912 - Gerhart Hauptmann 1911 - Maurice Maeterlinck 1910 - Paul Heyse 1909 - Selma Lagerlöf 1908 - Rudolf Eucken 1907 - Rudyard Kipling 1906 - Giosuè Carducci 1905 - Henryk Sienkiewicz 1904 - Frédéric Mistral, José Echegaray 1903 - Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson 1902 - Theodor Mommsen
Really? I was just busy laughing at that WP article crying that this lady shouldn't win it and their justification is because Americans wouldn't have heard of her. And you reckon Europeans are up themselves?????