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Comment by hugh3 | Hacker News Reader

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hugh3·

The Nobel Prize in Literature is odd. Looking through the list of every prize they've ever given out,

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Special/2010/10/07/List-of-Nobel...

I see a lot of names whom time has failed to vindicate.

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Yep. How about the award in 1974 to Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson? Maybe it's easier to win when you're both on the panel that picks the winner?

> whom time has failed to vindicate.

Yet.

I always thought that the Nobel prize winners are always very abstract. There are better awards to look at for examples of books you actually want to read...

Try reading "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" by Solzhenitsyn - an extraordinarily straightforward wee book.

The will explicitly says:

"one part to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency"

Think of it as the more technical academy awards. A movie that gets the Oscar for best sound editing might not be a great movie or a box-office hit, but still deserve the award.

But even if the Oscar for Best Sound Editing goes to a terrible and unpopular movie which happens to have good sound editing (e.g. Pearl Harbor, 2001) then there's still a lot that can be learned about sound editing from that movie. You can, for instance, hire the sound editor from Pearl Harbor to do the sound editing on a good film.

I'm not sure what the authors of mainstream fiction can learn from Harold Pinter, though.

> I see a lot of names whom time has failed to vindicate.

And I don't see : Virginia Wolf, Jorge Luis Borges, Milan Kundera, Fernando Pessoa, ...

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