‘Are you trying to reward the book that pushes literature forward the most; or are you wanting to select the book that you most want to push into the hands of people all round the world?’
That's a darn conundrum. An interesting problem. It's almost having to corrupt the purpose of the award in order to maintain its value. If an amazing work of literature requires a university education in languages just to understand, it'd be self-defeating to award it the prize because the prize then becomes of interest only to those with a university education in languages.
For the article overall, I feel like it can relate to any form of art by replacing specific books and authors with their analogies in other artistic fields. But then it occurred to me that literature / books / novels are adjudicated differently to music and film for example.
Literature awards are much less a popularity contest than music and film (movie) awards. Higher-brow by the fact that there's a higher barrier to entry (ie. reading).
Fundamentally, however:
We need difficult music. We need difficult movies. We need difficult personalities. We need difficult engineering.
Because easy is for the birds. Easy isn't progress.