On October 7, the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature was announced, and Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, the fifth African writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, was successfully awarded.
At the same time, haruki Murakami, a Japanese writer who has accompanied us for more than a decade, has once again entered our field of vision. I think that compared with Tolstoy, Haruki Murakami's "grievances" are really nothing. African writers won the award for the fifth time, what can we see in the winning law? Which Chinese writers are likely to win awards in the future?
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="127" >, Haruki Murakami vs Tolstoy</h1>
Haruki Murakami is not an ordinary runner, he has written "Norwegian Forest", "1Q84", won the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Prize (2015), Jerusalem Literature Prize (2009), Kafka Prize (2006), even if he has not won the Nobel Prize in Literature, it can be regarded as a soft hand.
What about Tolstoy? His full name was Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, and in addition to being a Russian writer, he was also a philosopher and political thinker. Although he has not won any prestigious awards, his "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina" can be regarded as masterpieces. He was nominated by the Nobel Prize jury 16 times in his lifetime, but never won the Nobel Prize in Literature once.
Why is it that some people always talk about Haruki Murakami's regrets about running away? There are three reasons, one is traffic, the second is betting, and the third is awards.
What is "traffic"? His Norwegian Forest has been translated into more than thirty languages and sold tens of millions of copies worldwide, and with such a flow of writers, it is too suitable for media hype. It is precisely because Murakami is concerned by so many people that the media pays special attention to him. Responsibly, he is even more topical than the Nobel Prize Committee.
What is "gambling"? For bookmakers, the Nobel Prize is a business. The people who eat melons bet, the bookmakers sit on the banks, and the betting feast is held once a year. If there is a popular candidate, who is concerned every year and is not awarded every year, the most profitable person will certainly not be the melon eaters, but the bookmakers.
What is an "award"? The Kafka Prize that Haruki Murakami won has a certain relationship with the Nobel Prize. The Austrian Jelinek and the Briton Harold Pinter, who won the Kafka Prize in 2004 and 2005, both won the Nobel Prize in the same year after the prize.
Many of the winners of the Jerusalem Literature Prize are also nobel laureates in literature, so Haruki Murakami's failure to win the prize is even more indignant to his fans. Don't forget, there are more than a dozen writers who have won both the Kafka Prize and the Jerusalem Prize for Literature who have not won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
If it is said that Haruki Murakami did not win the Nobel Prize, it is a regret of Haruki Murakami, then Tolstoy did not win the Nobel Prize, which should be the loss of the Nobel Prize. Even Nobel himself was a big fan of Tolstoy.
There are five writers in Russian history who have won the Nobel Prize in Literature: Punin (exiled abroad at the time of the award), Pasternak (who gave up the right to accept the prize in exchange for the right to live in his home country), Sholokhov, Solzhenitsyn (displaced, settled in the United States, and returned to China in his later years), brodsky (who had joined the United States at the time of the award). Only Sholokhov alone won the Nobel Prize in Literature and was respected in China.
Let's look at a few Russian writers who did not win the Nobel Prize in Literature: Chekhov, Pushkin, Turgenev, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Gorky, and Tolstoy. Winners and non-winners, who have a higher position in the history of world literature? Does the answer still need to be said? Let's compare the awards of African writers, and there seems to be a pattern to follow.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="191" > second, African writers have won five awards</h1>
What was the reason for the 2021 laureate Abdulzak Gürna?? To quote the Nobel Prize Committee, "for his uncompromising and compassionate insight into the impact of colonialism and the fate of refugees in the gulf between culture and continent." Born in Tanzania in 1948, Gurna went to England as a refugee in the 1960s and has since worked as a professor of English and postcolonial literature at the University of Kent in Canterbury. Who are the four Africans who have won the Nobel Prize in Literature before?
Nigerian Wallace Soyinka won the award in 1986. Born in Nigeria in 1934, he entered the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom at the age of 20 to study English, returned to China at the age of 27 and became active in politics, was arrested and imprisoned at the age of 33, released 22 months later, and began his exile until the age of 42. He was a visiting professor at Cambridge University, a top university in the UK and Yale University in the US.
Egyptian Najib Mahafuz won the prize in 1988. He published a book in 1959, Children in Our Neighborhood, which was considered banned because it violated islamic. He is regarded as one of the most important intellectuals in the Arab world and the first Arabic-speaking writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Nathan Godimer, a South African who won the prize in 1991, paid particular attention to the "awakening" of white And black South Africans under apartheid, after the upheaval and segregation of South African society at that time was eliminated by history. Her works have been published in American publications, including "The People of July" and "No One Accompanies Me".
South African John Maxwell Couche won the award in 2003. Born in 1940, he moved to the UK in his 20s, where he worked as a computer programmer and later earned a PhD in literature in the US. He published his first novel at the age of 34, writing themes related to racial segregation. Representative works include "The Dark Country", "From the Heart of the Nation", "Waiting for the Barbarians" and so on. He became an Australian citizen in 2002 and taught at the University of Adelaide.
Five African writers who won the Nobel Prize in Literature, mostly related to "colonization" and "apartheid", such topics link Europeans and Africans; most of these writers have lived in Europe and the United States; there are three whites and two blacks, perhaps this is one of the codes for winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. Compared with Africa, only one person in China has won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the winner is Mo Yan. But there is more than one Chinese associated with the Nobel Prize in Literature.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="235" >3, Chinese Writers and nobel prizes</h1>
Lin Yutang, who was unesco Director of Fine Arts and Literature, has been nominated, as has Hu Shi, one of the leaders of the new cultural movement advocating "vernacular languages.". There is a folk legend that "Lao She and Lu Xun were nominated", but that is only a legend after all, and the "50 years decryption" principle of the Nobel Prize can clearly see which writers were nominated that year.
In 2021, Xue Xue was once considered to be very promising to win the award, becoming the second Chinese to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, but she did not get her wish after all, and perhaps in the near future, she can get what she wants. Among other Chinese writers, although Mo Yan has a lot of controversy, his award in 2012 is ultimately an honor. Yan Lianke and Yu Hua are not without the possibility of winning awards in the future.
What do you think of the Nobel Prize in Literature, for Haruki Murakami, for Tolstoy? Let's talk in the comments section.