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Rumours fly as announcement of Nobel Prize for Literature is delayed

The clock continues to tick for the Nobel Academy, the body responsible for the nomination of Nobel Prize winners. For the first time in over 10 years, the Nobel Prize for Literature “was announced neither in the run-up to, nor in the same week as the four other main Nobel awards — medicine, physics, chemistry, and peace,” according to The Observer‘s Alex Duval Smith. The contested possibility of awarding the prize and its US $1.4-million purse to a non-fiction writer such as Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski has been cited by critics as a potential reason for delay; other rumours surround Turkish author Orhan Pamuk.

Politically important but considered a tad young for a lifetime achievement award at the age of 53, Pamuk is nonetheless favoured by critics to win the Prize. His rank among Nobel laureate would-be’s places the Prize at the centre of a larger controversy reminiscent of the “Rushdie affair,” over which two members of the Nobel Committee resigned in 1989 when the committee as a whole refused to issue a statement condemning the fatwa against British author Salman Rushdie. Pamuk will stand trial in December for a declaration he made earlier this year of the Turkish state’s responsibility in a 20th-century genocide against Armenians and Kurds.

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