While it is hard to determine a given pattern in Nobel Prize in Literature awards, there are still obvious pointers, broadly speaking, with which any keen observer could speculate.
By Chimezie Chika
By all accounts, speculating on the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature—the largest and most prestigious literary prize in the world, both in monetary (the winner gets 1 million dollars) and cultural (the winner achieves instant and enduring renown) terms—is little more than a futile effort. The Nobel Committee—the body that awards the prize—is notoriously secretive and unpredictable.
Very little is known of the processes by which it is able to determine the winners of that coveted award yearly. Though it has been suggested in places that some names are sometimes tentatively proffered to the committee by trusted associates, we know that what really goes on in the committee is as obscure as Jupiter or Saturn.
What we often see is the end result, which never ceases to surprise and, sometimes, even befuddle. In 2016, the Committee went even further with their eccentricity by awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan, the legendary American musician, for which it deservedly received some of its fiercest criticisms yet.
The following year, 2017, the Committee was rocked by scandals, including racketeering and allegations of sexual abuse, after failing to announce a laureate for the year. Suffice it to say that everyone thought the Nobel had seen its unfortunate undoing. That was not to be, for the ensuing years saw the Nobel Committee return to character, awarding prizes to authors like Kazuo Ishiguro and Louise Gluck.
While it is hard to determine a given pattern in Nobel Prize in Literature awards, there are still obvious pointers, broadly speaking, with which any keen observer could speculate. The first, and the most obvious, is that the Nobel is awarded solely for lifetime work—which is why the prize often goes to men and women who are well past middle age.
Another pointer is that the prize seems to disproportionately go to reclusive writers, or writers who might be popular within their country or sub-region, but relatively unknown in the rest of the world. Yet, the Nobel is near faultless in the quality of its awardees; their all-encompassing attribute is mastery of their craft, and dedication to the occupation of writing for decades.
In recent years, the stats have suggested a number of possible winners among a wide pool of writers who fit into the ideal Nobel candidate.
Of these, there are the usual suspects: Japanese author, Haruki Murakami, whose writing I admire immensely, but who is admittedly very famous indeed; Thomas Pynchon who, apart from his enigmatic oeuvre, is as obscure as it comes (up there with the likes of his late American compatriot, J. D. Salinger, in having no desire for any public appearance), with scant interviews and extremely rare pictures; Don Delillo, who is public enough, is an outlier here. Into this group, we might include an English contingent composed of Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes.
Gerald Murnane, one of the most reclusive writers working today, appears to have a strong chance this year. Murnane is a towering figure of Australian letters and has been mentioned a few times in connection to the Nobel in recent years (I feel, particularly, the need to dwell a little on Australian literature, for it seems to me that the Nobel telescope might alight finally on that old, red continent since the last Australian-born author to be awarded the prize was Patrick White in 1973).
More than that, Murnane’s work bestrides that symbolic psycho-moral boundary we may find if we merge the works of writers like J. M. Coetzee, Borges, and Proust into one. His novel, The Plains—as in the rest of his work, unravels the notion of time not as mathematical or physical quantity but as a compression of place and mystery.
Murnane’s compatriot, Alexis Wright, who published the nearly 800-page epic Praiseworthy—a possible great Australian novel—is a legitimate contender (other Aussie authors like Peter Carey and David Maalouf are noteworthy).
Another writer in the Murnane category—by which I mean, very likely to win—is Lucy Ellmann, the American-British author of the colossal Ducks, Newburyport, a novel of over 1000 pages written in one continuous stream-of-consciousness sentence.
One cannot speculate fully on the Nobel Prize without referring to the fecund literary regions of East Asia and South America, where the likes of Can Xue and Isabel Allende are yet to win, though they are mentioned often.
Where do African authors feature in all these and which African writers stand a chance? I have reasons to believe that someone from the continent might win again, just a couple of years after Abdulrazaq Gurnah’s win in 2021. Gurnah was a relatively unknown writer, even in Africa, until his win.
Prior to Gurnah, four other Africans have won the Nobel Prize in Literature: famed Nigerian playwright and poet, Wole Soyinka, was the first Black person to win in 1986; two years later, in 1988, Egyptian novelist, Naguib Mahfouz, claimed it; Nadine Gordimer followed three years later in 1991. It then took twelve years before another South African, J. M. Coetzee won (Coetzee is now a naturalised Australian citizen.).
Generally, the gap of two and three years between 1986 and 1991 seems amenable to the present situation, if we are to take patterns at face value. Hence 2024 and 2025 may yet yield another laureate from Africa. But who are the most likely candidates?
The first name is Kenyan novelist, playwright, and essayist, Ngugi wa Thiong’o who, by now, has become a perennial mention in relation to the Nobel Prize. Many think it is an injustice that a man of Ngugi’s stature in African letters has not won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Such arguments—inadequately informed as they are—could be made for many great writers in the past who didn’t win the Nobel in their lifetime (and the truth is that the Nobel will not go to everybody; such is the nature of such cultural capital).
Another African who has been writing since the 1960s and has been mentioned alongside Ngugi is Somali novelist, Nuruddin Farah. Both writers have created a body of work that possesses the unique attributes of Somali identity in Farah’s case and political agency in Ngugi’s.
Highly decorated Moroccan author, Tahar Ben Jelloun, has a strong stake for a win this year. Jelloun is not a new name to Nobel bookmarkers. Reading his The Sacred Night many years ago, I had been arrested by the author’s mastery of allegory—his curious conflation of historical realism, myth, and lore.
To an extreme extent, it is some of the same attributes one finds in the work of Mozambican novelist, Mia Couto, who seems to stand a fair chance, judging from the similarity of his magical realism body of work to that of a few past laureates.
South African writer, Zakes Mda, who possesses an oeuvre that courts the mythical and the historical, fits the Nobel category. All the African Nobel laureates in literature have come from just four countries: South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt and Tanzania—all large countries by geographical size and population.
While not many writers from Africa’s smaller countries have been mentioned in connection to the Nobel Prize in Literature. French-Rwandan novelist, Scholastique Mukasonga, has quickly emerged in the last few years as a contender. It is not clear how this came about, but it is still within that enigmatic purview of the Nobel and its idiosyncratic committee.
It should not be surprising if none of the writers I have mentioned win it; it should also not be surprising if the name that emerges on the 10th of October 2024—the date of this year’s announcement—turns out to be one very few have heard of.
In conclusion, there are a few things to note. In speculating the possibility of an African winner in this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, I have clearly not named any poet. The reason is that most of the African winners who have won the prize are novelists.
In short, the only African poet to become a Nobel laureate is Wole Soyinka, though it could be argued that he did not win for his poetry (“the drama of existence” phrase in his Nobel citation makes a case for that). Nevertheless, an African poet may still win.
The problem, though, is where the African poets (with appropriate age and oeuvre) are. It seems to me that the most eligible African candidates in that genre have largely passed away. I am sanguine, however, that someone from the younger generation will emerge as a contender in the coming decades.
Chimezie Chika’s short stories and essays have appeared in or forthcoming from, amongst other places, The Weganda Review, The Republic, The Shallow Tales Review, Terrain.org, Isele Magazine, Lolwe, Fahmidan Journal, Efiko Magazine, Dappled Things, and Afrocritik. He is the fiction editor of Ngiga Review. His interests range from culture, history, to art, literature, and the environment. You can find him on Twitter @chimeziechika1.