Someone Not Mentioned On This List From a Country Not Mentioned (2-1)

October 5, 2021 11:43 AM

Who Will Win the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature? by Alex Shephard who has a terrible track record with these predictions [The New Republic; Ungated Version]
posted by chavenet (18 comments total)

Alex Shephard is one of the only white men who can make erudite little literary ha-ha jokes about writers I'm too uneducated to have heard of and actually make me laugh. I look forward to this list every year even though it is never right. I thought last year's epithets were especially great but this year has some very good moments, including "Writer of the Marvel Cinematic Universe but for even more humorless nerds" and "Second-best David Mitchell."
posted by babelfish at 11:57 AM on October 5, 2021 [3 favorites]

I get maybe 10% of these references if I'm being generous, but living novelists "most likely to publish a posthumous book-length screed against cancel culture" is a game I would very much like to gamble money on.
posted by Think_Long at 12:27 PM on October 5, 2021 [4 favorites]

Also, the Sally Rooney bucket hat story if you needed to google it like me.
posted by Think_Long at 12:29 PM on October 5, 2021 [2 favorites]

I started writing a comment about how the "What About a Canadian?" list was missing Anne Carson, and then stalled out trying to come up with an Anne Carson joke, only to continue reading and find a paragraph-length meditation on the nature of Anne Carson, "Canadian poet, playwright, translator, essayist, ancient deity, shadow on the wall, copse of trees swaying gently in the wind." Now I want an Anne Carson bucket hat.
posted by oulipian at 12:45 PM on October 5, 2021 [5 favorites]

His snootiness about Bob Dylan is unforgivable. Dylan deserved it.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 1:28 PM on October 5, 2021 [4 favorites]

This essay is way funnier than an essay about who might win the Literature Nobel has a right to be. I literally LOL'd several times, but I'm a huge nerd, so.
posted by gwint at 1:37 PM on October 5, 2021 [6 favorites]

I’ll be honest: Carson intrigues me, and in various drafts of this piece I have included her as a favorite. She should be undone by two simple facts: She is a poet and she writes in English. And yet, is Carson a poet? Does she write in English, or do the strange markings she makes on a woodblock before sending to New Directions (which then packages them as a special edition retailing at $74.99) simply happen to appear to be written in English?

His description of Anne Carson's ineffable nature was truly delightful. But I own a copy of Nox so am obviously very biased.
posted by the wine-dark sea at 3:10 PM on October 5, 2021 [3 favorites]

This might be nostalgia on my part, but if it’s not someone as eminently deserving as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o or Annie Ernaux, then I hope it’s someone so unexpected that the New York Times runs an article bemoaning how an author the article writer has never heard of could possibly get the Nobel Prize when Philip Roth didn’t.
posted by Kattullus at 4:14 PM on October 5, 2021 [3 favorites]

How 'bout Rudolfo Anaya?
posted by Oyéah at 6:15 PM on October 5, 2021 [1 favorite]

The only names I recognized were of writers I thought dead. Hmm.
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 6:20 PM on October 5, 2021 [2 favorites]

Also, Anne Carson sounds amazing! Off to do some reading.
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 6:24 PM on October 5, 2021 [2 favorites]

Regarding Anne Carson, I recommend Autobiography of Red.
posted by mai at 5:47 AM on October 6, 2021 [2 favorites]

The Joyce Carol Oates/Francis Fukuyama skeleton thing cracked me up. Whatever else Alex Shephard does, he does good research.
posted by dlugoczaj at 8:38 AM on October 6, 2021 [2 favorites]

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2021 was awarded to Abdulrazak Gurnah "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents."

So it is indeed Someone Not Mentioned On This List!
posted by oulipian at 4:12 AM on October 7, 2021 [3 favorites]

I kind of miss the days when Gert Fylking (journalist, provocateur, ) would shout “finally!” as the winner was announced, regardless of who it was.
posted by boogieboy at 4:29 AM on October 7, 2021 [2 favorites]

I've made posts about the Nobel Prize for literature most years since 2008, and it's never been as difficult to find articles and essays about a writer who's won the Nobel Prize. So well done Swedish Academy, after a few more-than-wobbly years you're back doing what you do best.
posted by Kattullus at 4:43 AM on October 7, 2021 [1 favorite]

Author was right. The winner was not on his list.
posted by dangerousdan at 1:00 PM on October 7, 2021

103 African Writers Respond to Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Nobel Prize Win
posted by chavenet at 9:16 AM on October 14, 2021 [1 favorite]