This week our reporters bring you news of Sweden’s reaction to last week’s Nobel Prize in Literature announcement by the Swedish Academy, the FILBA international festival in Buenos Aires, as well as the surprise of the Booker Prize winner(s!) in the UK.
Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden
Since the announcement of the 2018 and 2019 Laureates of the Nobel Prize in Literature last week, the subsequent debate shows no sign of receding. Before the announcement, literary Nobel Prize discussions within Sweden focused on whether awarding a 2018 prize was good for the world of literature or bad because it would smooth over the Swedish Academy’s connection to misconducts.
After the announcement of Polish Olga Tokarczuk (“Flights”) and Austrian Peter Handke as the two most recent literary Nobel Prize Laureates, however, the pros and cons of announcing a 2018 laureate has waned in the shadow of the controversial choice of Handke. The disagreement in Sweden centers on whether Handke’s political standpoint is misunderstood—if he has simply been naive and used by others, if he is an apologist of war crimes—or if awarding Handke is correct on solely literary merits and that disregarding politics is possible.
The backdrop to all this is the continuing debate on the Swedish Academy which has been an ongoing acid test since Matilda Gustavsson’s article in Dagens Nyheter on November 22, 2017, that tore down the culture of silence surrounding Jean-Claude Arnault who now serves imprisonment for rape. Gustavsson’s article led to a crisis within the Swedish Academy because of the Academy’s association with Arnault along with allegations of members of the Academy abusing their positions for financial and other gains.
In the midst of the Literary Nobel Prize debate, last Saturday the news that former permanent secretary Sara Danius had died of cancer at the age of fifty-seven reached the Swedes. A professor of literature as well as aesthetics, Danius was a prominent Swedish essayist with publications including The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics and The Prose of the World: Flaubert and the Art of Making Things Visible. The first woman to become the head of the Swedish Academy, Danius was forced out after initiating a thorough examination of allegations of misconduct concerning the 233-year-old organization and its finances. While the Swedish Academy still grapples with coming to terms with its standing in contemporary society, Danius leaves a strong imprint on the Swedish literary scene.
Sarah Moses, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Buenos Aires, Argentina
The 11th FILBA international festival was held in Buenos Aires from September 25 to 29. The annual literary festival gathers authors, translators, and publishers—as well as readers—from Argentina and abroad for talks, panel discussions, readings, and workshops. For those interested in literature in translation, Saturday morning’s encuentro, “Cómo circula hoy la literatura entre el inglés y el español” offered a glimpse at commercial, communicational, and cultural factors that influence how works move between English and Spanish. Invited to participate were Carolina Orloff, translator and publisher at Charco Press, which specializes in Latin American literature in English translation; writer, publisher, translator, and professor, Valerie Miles; and Salvador Cristófaro, translator and publisher of the Argentine house Fiordo, whose catalogue contains numerous English titles in Spanish translation.
Translation as a cultural system and how the metropolises of the world factor into it—as well as the process of translation itself—were the subject of the event “Topografías de la traducción: la ciudad, sus culturas, sus versiones” that took place at the Museum of Latin American Art (MALBA) on October 10. Organized by the museum and the Goethe-Insititut, the event brought together Mariana Dimópulos and Gustavo Sorá, Argentine specialists in translation and anthropology, respectively, and writers and translators from France, Germany, and Mexico for a discussion that expanded from translation in Buenos Aires and the River Plate region to that taking place around the world.
On October 11, two long-standing reading series hosted local writers for an evening of stories and poetry. This month’s guests at the Siga al Conejo Blanco art series in Palermo were authors Ana Ojeda, Marcelo Figueras, Luis Mey, and Bibiana Ricciardi, while later on in the evening, the Bar de la Tribu in the neighborhood of Almagro was the setting for the Ciclo Carne Argentina, which featured readings by several writers and poets as well as live music.
Sarah Moore, Assistant Blog Editor, reporting from the UK
The Booker Prize, awarded annually to a full-length novel written in English, was announced at the beginning of this week and surprised everyone by revealing not one, but two winners: Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo. They will each have an equal share of the £50,000 prize. The joint win also gave rise to two records—Atwood is the oldest to ever win the Booker prize and Evaristo the first black woman to do so.
Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments (Vintage, Chatto & Windus) is the much-anticipated sequel to her 1985 dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. Reprising the story fifteen years later in Gilead, the fictional totalitarian state where women are forcibly assigned to men as a “Handmaid” to produce children, the novel centres around the two daughters of Offred (the protagonist of The Handmaid’s Tale,) as well as Lydia, another character from the first book. With The Handmaid’s Tale already being the recipient of multiple awards (including shortlisted for the 1986 Booker), an A-Level UK national curriculum text, and also the basis of the hit 2017 Hulu television series of the same name by Bruce Miller, expectations at its release in September were high. In the UK, the book sold 103,177 print copies in its first week and is currently the highest-selling hardback fiction title of the year. Reviews were generally positive, with Anne Enright calling it “Atwood at her best” in the Guardian and Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times praising “Atwood’s sheer assurance as a storyteller” which “makes for a fast, immersive narrative that’s as propulsive as it is melodramatic.” The high expectation for success, it would seem, was met.
Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other (Penguin General, Hamish Hamilton), her eighth novel, follows twelve characters, the majority of them black British women, whose diverse lives intertwine as they each deal with their own choices, trials, and experiences. Known for her mixture of verse and novel, as well as her self-consciously hybrid stance in her work, Evaristo’s first verse novel, Lara (1997), was a critical success, nominated for several literary prizes, and winning the EMMA Best Novel Award in 1999. Her work challenges not only racial and national boundaries but also the traditional boundaries of genre. As Sarah Ladipo Manyika says in The New Statesman: “In Evaristo’s eighth book she continues to expand and enhance our literary canon. If you want to understand modern day Britain, this is the writer to read.”
Bestowing the prize on two authors has not come without its controversy and speculation. Many have decried the overshadowing by the tumult of a double win of what could have been an emphatic celebration of the first black female winner. Others have criticised the judging panel for refusing to make a choice between a bestseller and a more unknown book, between an established literary giant and a younger writer known for transgressing traditional boundaries.
Of course, it must be remembered that two of the other four nominees on the shortlist were also women* and that both The Testaments and Girl, Woman, Other fiercely challenge and interrogate society in their critiques. Following on from last weeks’ many discussions over the choice of the Nobel Literature Prize’s 2018 and 2019 winners, Olga Tokarczuk and Peter Handke, respectively,—and especially the widespread criticism of awarding such a prize to Handke— what is clear is that the behaviour and choices of the judging panels for prestigious literary prizes are under ever more scrutiny and that the politics of such awards very often overshadow the celebration and enjoyment of their winners’ literary merit and achievements.
*The other nominees on the shortlist were Lucy Ellmann for Ducks, Newburyport (Galley Beggar Press,) Chigozie Obioma for An Orchestra of Minorities (Hachette, Little Brown,) Sir Salman Rushdie (whose 1981 novel Midnight’s Children won the Booker Prize as well as the Booker of Bookers Prize and the Best of the Booker Prize) for Quichotte (Vintage, Jonathan Cape,) and Elif Shafak for 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World (Penguin General, Viking).
*****
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