Who Nominates Writers for the Nobel Prize?

 

By Christian Lorentzen

  

                

The Nobel Prize gold medal awarded to Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez is exhibited at the National Library of Colombia in Bogota, on April 17, 2015. One year after the death of Garcia Marquez, an exhibition shows off the writer's personal objects, including the typewriter on which he typed "One Hundred Years of Solitude". AFP

PHOTO/Eitan Abramovich (Photo credit should read EITAN ABRAMOVICH/AFP/Getty Images) Photo: Eitan Abramovich/AFP/Getty Images

The Nobel Prizes are always shrouded in secrecy, the prize for literature, which will be announced tomorrow morning, no less than the rest. But we do know something about the process. An international set of dozens of nominators send their recommendations to the 18-member Swedish Academy, and the academy selects a shortlist of finalists and makes a recommendation for the award to the Nobel Committee for Literature, which makes the final decision. The selection of journalist and oral historian Svetlana Alexievich last year was surprising to many outside Russia, including myself, but she was a Ladbroke’s favorite, at least in part because it was public knowledge that she had been nominated by Ural Federal University, in Sverdlovsk Oblast, Russia.

 

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