Literature Laureates: The First 75 Years of the Nobel Prize

I am a big fan of the Nobel Prize for Literature. I have carefully tracked down works from every laureate, and read them. (Some were easier than others.) In the early years of the prize, prior to WWII, few notable authors were feted: the omissions of major names is more notable. As such, I wouldn’t be surprised that it was overly focused on Europe and the ‘West’ in those years. 
But the nominees are now public, and that inspired me to do some digging.

Between 1901 and 1975, the most recent year of public nominations, I went through and tracked non-NATO-ish nominees. That is, nominees who weren’t from Europe, the U.S. and Canada, or Australia and New Zealand.

The first nominee to fit this profile was all the way back in 1906. South America dominated in the early years. Asia dominated the later years. Africa was, well into the 1970s, barely represented at all. Without further ado, here’s my data and analysis:

Asia: 60 nominees, total. First winner: Rabindranath Tagore (India), 1913 - first non-NATO-ish winner overall. Other winners nominated in this period: Yasunari Kawabata (Japan), 1961; Kenzaburo Oe (Japan), 1994. Superlatives: First Chinese nomination - 1939; First Japanese nomination - 1947; First Vietnamese nomination - 1969.

South America: 44 nominees, total. First Winner: Gabriela Mistral (Chile), 1945. Other winners nominated in this period: Pablo Neruda (Chile), 1971; Miguel Asturias (Guatemala), 1967; V.S. Naipaul (Trinidad), 2001; Octavio Paz (Mexico), 1990; Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Colombia), 1982. Superlatives: First non-NATO-ish nominee - Pedro Pablo Figueroa (Chile), 1906; First-ever black nominee - Jean Price-Mars (Haiti), 1960.

Africa: 7 nominees, total. First winner: Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt), 1988. Other winners nominated in this period: Nadine Gordimer (South Africa), 1991. Superlatives: First non-NATO-ish nominee: Taha Hussein (Egypt), 1949; First - and only - black African nominee in this period - Leopold Senghor (Senegal), 1963. 

Total Non-NATO-ish Nominees: 111. Total Nobel Literature Nominees: 881.

Total Non-NATO-ish Winners (during this era): 5. Total Nobel Literature Winners (during this era): 74.

Percent of NN-ish winners (from NN-ish nominees): 5/111 = 4%

Percent of NN-ish winners (from total nominees): 5/881 = .5%

Percent of other winners (from other nominees): 69/770= 9%

Percent of other winners (from total nominees): 69/881= 7%

Percent of total winners (from total nominees): 74/881 = 8%

So what conclusions can we draw? First off, if you were a NN-ish candidate, your chances of nomination were lower: only 12% of all nominees were NN-ish. And NN-ish nominees were less likely to win: 4% versus 9% for others. Your overall odds were low - only 8% of nominees ever won - but there was a higher chance if you weren’t an NN-ish nominee.

It also shows that the selection had a strong bias. From the initial NN-ish nominee of 1906, most years there were NN-ish nominees - especially after WWI, and very especially after WWII. Asia picks up significantly towards the end of the run: Between 1965 and 1975 there were 41 nominees. Only 1 of those, Kenzaburo Oe, got the prize. 

Consider other candidates nominated in that ten year span, and the odds are far greater: Gunther Grass (1999), Saul Bellow (1976), Claude Simon (1985), Patrick White (1973), Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1970), Elias Canetti (1981), William Golding (1983), Odysseas Elytis (1979), Vicente Aleixandre (1977), Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978), Czeslaw Milosz (1980), and Harold Pinter (2005). 12 winners out of ten years of nominations. 

Furthermore, things are particularly bleak for Africa, and black authors generally. Of the 7 African nominees, two were white South Africans, and three were Egyptian. In 1975 Chinua Achebe was nominated, in 1974 Ralph Ellison of the USA, in 1971 James Baldwin of the USA, in 1969 Aime Cesaire, alongside the two aforementioned. A total of 6 nominees out of 881 - around half of one percent. 

Even women - significantly overshadowed - did better: 89 women were nominated (10% of nominees), and 8 women won during this period - roughly twice as likely as the NN-ish nominees’ half a percent who went on to win.

After all this analysis, we can say that 1) far more nominees should have been NN-ish, and that 2) those who were nominated were typically passed over for other nominees from Europe and the United States. This suggests that the Nobel committee’s bias wasn’t due to a lack of nominees – 111 in 75 years, but a cultural bias against people were non-NATO-ish.

Which… I mean, I had sort of assumed, but I’d kept the door open, mentally, that maybe there just weren’t a lot of nominees from South America, Asia, or Africa…? But that turned out to be true only for Africa. This is why I’m now balancing the Nobels with the Neustadt Prize, which does a much, much better job on awarding NN-ish authors: 15/29 – fully half of the laureates. And around 14% are black, and a quarter are women – all more representative of global literature than the Nobel.