Step forward, everyone's favourite - Abdulrazak Gurnah.


You have never heard of him, have never read him, never will.

"Gurnah was born in Tanzania in 1948, but fled to Britain as a teenager. While his first language is Swahili, he writes mainly in Eng­lish, with some Arabic.  He received the prize “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”.

ZZzzzzzzz...... Back to sleep, everyone. A case of 'read the poster/publicity gush - read the book/s."

Few writers in our time were more committed to the novel or had more idealism about the heights the form could scale.

How should one remember Kundera, now that his own end, after 90 years of history, has arrived? As a supreme anatomist of power? For his irony and playfulness, his cynical—though never unromantic—dissections of love? The strange sparse music of his books, his hatred of kitsch, his demonic delight in outraging our delusions? Will he be remembered at all, other than as a period piece? In a time of competing fundamentalisms—religious and political—it seems unlikely his posthumous reputation will have an easy ride, though as long as political or personal lies exist his work will have things to tell us. “The struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” he famously wrote, and amnesia, it’s clear, is never out of fashion. The dream of communism—with its pat denial of human nature and its insistence that “real communism has never been tried”—refuses to disappear, whatever the car-crash with reality which invariably follows. In the world of Kundera’s books, there’s no divine justice and no crime’s ever properly redressed. Things merely fade over time, the world moves on, and people are never brutal enough with themselves to learn the lessons of experience. “History is as light as individual human life,” he wrote, “unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.” Should the same prove true of Kundera’s novels—more pertinent than ever as today’s clutch of dogmas press their shrill, mirthless suits for our surrender—then the joke, not a very funny one, will be on us.
https://quillette.com/2023/07/11/milan-kundera-the-nobel-prize-for-literature-wi...

It is rare to see a book transition well to the screen but the movie Unbearable Lightness of Being, based on his book ( and foll oi wing it quite closely) was a triumph.

His other books are also very good, well worth reading and mulling over.

One of the reasons for anger at the theory-ridden English departments of our day is that they sold out the richness of literature for a small number of crude ideas—gender, race, class, and the rest of the detritus—and hence gave up their cultural birthright for a pot of message.

One of the most important functions of literature in the current day is to cultivate a healthy distrust of the ideas thrown up by journalism and social science. Novels and poems can be the antidote here. “The novel’s spirit is the spirit of complexity,” Milan Kundera writes. “The novelist says to the reader: things are not as simple as you think.” When he is working well, the good novelist persuasively establishes that life is more surprising, bizarre, fascinating, complex, and rich than any shibboleth, concept, or theory used to explain it. A literary education establishes a strong taste for the endless variousness of life; it teaches how astonishing reality is—and how obdurate to even the most ingenious attempts to grasp its mechanics or explain any serious portion of it! “A man is more complicated than his thoughts,” wrote Valéry, which, if you think about it, is happily so.
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2008/6/a-literary-education

Frank wrote on Oct 8^th, 2021 at 6:13pm:

Soooo.... all you multiculti fetishists, what did you think of Abdulrazak Gurnah's books, which you must have avidly read since he won the Nobel.

Bbwian? Mothra? Sad Skippy's Saggy Sack? Thick Smiff? Duckwit? Karnal - he's tinted so you MUST HAVE consumed him (ahem).

Tomorrow - Nobel Prize for Peace

Frank wrote on Oct 9^th, 2025 at 10:11pm:


Is that not like giving an ADHD child a prize for sitting still? How does Trump live up to the fake award?

Anne Carson - she no Hemingway, Camus, Churchill, Sartre, Naipaul, Milosz, Bertrand Russell, T,S Eliot, Steinbeck, Beckett,  Thomas Mann, Pirandello, GB Shaw, Yeats, Kipling, Harold Pinter, Bob Dylan, dario Fo, Grass, Boll, Seamus Heaney, Singer.



I think she is a DEI winner, not a winner on literary, artistic merit. She will be soon forgotten as her literary work is slight and banal.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/anne-carson

Anne Carson has won the Nobel Prize for Literature for her bold, inventive, breathtaking work

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Anne Carson has been awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. The 76-year-old Canadian poet, essayist, translator and classicist was in Iceland “listening to the wind” when the news broke. The Swedish Academy praised her “bold and inventive” oeuvre for its “playful dialogue with the classical tradition”, through which she has fashioned “new forms for contemporary literature”.

In books like her 1998 verse novel Autobiography of Red (which has sold nearly 100,000 copies in the United States), Wrong Norma (2024), her recent poetry collection, and her 1986 debut Eros the Bittersweet – a book-length essay about the god of love – she challenges formal conventions and moves across literary genres.

Carson’s own account of what language can do offers a sense of the possibilities such invention opens up:

    words can squirt sideways, mute and mad; you think they are tools, or toys, or tame, and all at once they burn all your clothes off and you’re standing there singed and ridiculous in the glare of the lightning.


‘The easiest difficult poet’

Born in Toronto in 1950, Carson studied classics at the University of Toronto and went on to teach ancient Greek. Eros the Bittersweet grew out of her scholarly training.

Carson, who divides her time between Ann Arbor, Michigan in the US, and Iceland, is famously private. But in a 2024 essay in the London Review of Books, she revealed she has Parkinson’s disease, and mourned the disintegration of her handwriting and the erosion of her long pleasure in filling “shelves and shelves” of notebooks.

She has been awarded Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships. And she became the first woman to win the TS Eliot prize, for her collection The Beauty of the Husband, in 2001.

Her work is fiercely learned, and makes no apology for it. “Almost everything she writes is about several things at once,” notes critic Lola Seaton, “and ranges associatively across the history of Western thought.”

Yet that erudition sits easily alongside lyrical, direct accounts of human emotion and experience. This may help explain her appeal to readers who could otherwise find such intellectual density and avowed experimentalism forbidding – or even off-putting. The New York Times’ poetry columnist has called her “the easiest difficult poet”.

In Carson’s hands, the breakdown of a marriage can become a way of testing Keats’ claim that beauty is truth. An ancient monster can grow up to be a teenager struggling with his sexuality. Marilyn Monroe can be reimagined as Helen of Troy. A short talk on Homer’s Odyssey can lead to poet John Ashbery’s thoughts on the importance of light.

Where to start?

For readers encountering Carson for the first time, Autobiography of Red is a good place to begin. Its reworking of an ancient myth indicates her artistic sensibility and shows how closely her scholarly interests and imaginative pursuits are intertwined.

The text draws on the work of Stesichorus, an ancient Greek lyric poet whose account of the monster Geryon survives only in fragments. In the familiar heroic version of the myth, Heracles kills Geryon and makes off with his livestock.

Stesichorus had already complicated that account by treating Geryon sympathetically. Carson, characteristically, takes things that little bit further, recasting the monster in a contemporary story of sexual desire and artistic discovery.

Her Geryon is a red boy with wings. Growing up in an abusive household on an Atlantic island, he finds a means of expression in the medium of photography. He falls in love with Heracles, a young man whose casual approach to their relationship leaves Geryon exposed and undone.

When they meet again years later, the attraction persists, as does its capacity to wound him. In this way, the mythic and heroic material she draws on is transformed into something more intimate, with consequences Geryon must learn to live with.
Painful contradictions of desire recur

The painful contradictions of desire are a recurring concern in Carson’s writing. It is evident in her first published book, Eros the Bittersweet.

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time, it considers the paradox of a desire that produces pleasure while causing pain, taking Sappho’s account of eros (or passionate, sexual love and desire), as a point of departure. This is how it starts:

    It was Sappho who first called eros “bittersweet.” No one who has been in love disputes this.

The conversational second sentence brings the ancient observation into the remit of the reader’s experience. Across Carson’s body of work, the distance between classical literature and contemporary life thoroughly, repeatedly contracts in this fashion. Old texts offer exacting accounts of feelings we might, in the first flush of emotion, take to be ours alone.

Carson also reminds us these connections between literature and lived experience extend beyond the classical world. Consider her long poem about unrequited love The Glass Essay, collected in Glass, Irony and God (1995) – and cited by the Nobel committee. The poem’s speaker visits her mother after the end of a relationship, taking Emily Brontë with her in the form of a book. Reading is part of her effort to understand what has happened.