Comment about 'insular' Americans ignites Nobel war of words

The top member of the award jury for the Nobel Prize in Literature has said he thinks the United States is too insular and ignorant to compete with Europe when it comes to great writing.

The comment has sparked a war of words across the Atlantic, with the head of the U.S. National Book Foundation saying: "Put him in touch with me, and I'll send him a reading list."

As the Swedish Academy enters final deliberations for this year's literature award, permanent secretary Horace Engdahl said it's no coincidence that most winners are European.

'Europe still is the centre of the literary world . . . not the United States.' — Horace Engdahl, secretary, Swedish Academy

"Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the centre of the literary world . . . not the United States," he said in an interview Tuesday.

He said the 16-member award jury has not selected this year's winner, and dropped no hints about who was on the short list.

Americans Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates usually figure in speculation, but Engdahl wouldn't comment on any names.

Speaking generally about American literature, however, he said U.S. writers are "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture," dragging down the quality of their work.

"The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature," Engdahl said. "That ignorance is restraining."

His comments were met with fierce reactions from literary officials across the Atlantic.

'You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that ... has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce and Nabokov ... would spare us the categorical lectures.' —David Remnick, editor, The New Yorker

"You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures," said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker.

"And if he looked harder at the American scene that he dwells on, he would see the vitality in the generation of Roth, Updike and DeLillo, as well as in many younger writers, some of them sons and daughters of immigrants writing in their adopted English. None of these poor souls, old or young, seem ravaged by the horrors of Coca-Cola."

Harold Augenbraum, executive director of the foundation that administers the National Book Awards, said he wanted to send Engdahl a reading list of U.S. literature.

"Such a comment makes me think that Mr. Engdahl has read little of American literature outside the mainstream and has a very narrow view of what constitutes literature in this age," he said.

"In the first place, one way the United States has embraced the concept of world culture is through immigration. Each generation, beginning in the late 19th century, has recreated the idea of American literature."

He added that this is something the English and French are discovering as immigrant groups begin to take their place in those traditions.

The most recent American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature was Toni Morrison in 1993. Other American winners include Saul Bellow, John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway.

As permanent secretary, Engdahl is a voting member of, and spokesman for, the secretive panel that selects the winners of what many consider the most prestigious award in literature.

The academy often picks obscure writers and hardly ever selects bestselling authors. It regularly faces accusations of snobbery, political bias and even poor taste.

Since Japanese writer Kenzaburo Oe won the award in 1994, the selections have had a distinct European flavour. Nine of the subsequent laureates were Europeans, including last year's winner, Doris Lessing of Britain. Of the other four, one was from Turkey and the others from South Africa, China and Trinidad. All had strong ties to Europe.

The Nobel Prize announcements start next week with the medicine award on Monday, followed by physics, chemistry, peace and economics. Next Thursday is a possible date for the literature prize, but the Swedish Academy by tradition only gives the date two days before.

Engdahl suggested the announcement date could be a few weeks away, saying "it could take some time" before the academy settles on a name.

Each Nobel Prize includes a $1.3 million purse, a gold medal and a diploma. The awards are handed out Dec. 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel's death in 1896.