The Nobel prize archives are sealed for 50 years and now a Swedish reporter has looked at the 1961 jury's comments.  Here's a snippet from the Guardian: The prose of Tolkien – who was nominated by his friend and fellow fantasy author CS Lewis – "has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality", wrote jury member Anders Österling. Frost, on the other hand, was dismissed because of his "advanced age" – he was 86 at the time – with the jury deciding the American poet's years were "a fundamental obstacle, which the committee regretfully found it...

From PublishersLunch daily email: With digital discussion and diminished expectations for future print sales ever more present at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair, the crystallizing moment came down to this: the Nobel prize was given to a well-known, widely-translated author with a big backlist--but none of those many English editions are available as ebooks. I don't think that's a statement you'll hear again in the future, and it encapsulates many of the dichotomies and conflicts of the current transitional moment. (Since the Carmen Balcells Agency has been reluctant to grant those rights, no English ebook editions are currently expected.) It will...

Literary blogger M.A. Orthofer successfully predicted this year’s Nobel prize winner after noticing the web domain mail.Svenskaakademien.se in his referrer logs. M.A. Orthofer’s Literary Saloon/Complete Review publishes lots of reviews of novels in translation. Therefore, it is not surprising that even the Nobel committee would end up using Complete Reviews as a reference.  Here is the Herta Müller page at the complete review.  He summarizes the Romanian' author’s appeal: Pros: Lyric/poetic sense of language, in both poety and prose ...

Last Saturday Doris Lessing's Nobel Prize acceptance speech was read by her UK publisher Nicholas Pearson at the award ceremony in Stockholm. Lessing, 88, could not attend the ceremony because of a bad back, according to the BBC. Her acceptance speech wanders from issue to issue without ever really taking a position, which has not hindered some of the main stream media in interpreting her words as "Internet makes people stoopid," which is a lovely self-referential twist. You have to admire an author who can cause such an effect with a mere speech. In the speech, Lessing looks for a...