The Nobel Prize That Karen Should Have Won

The Literary Saloon alerts me to a fascinating bit of literary history: Karen Blixen (who wrote as "Isak Dinesen" and is this website's namesake) was a hair's breath away from winning the 1959 Nobel Prize for Literature--but she was foiled by her Danish roots.

From The Copenhagen Post, drawing from newly-opened Nobel archives:

The author best known for her work ‘Out of Africa’ was in the final four for the 1957 prize, but was the favourite two years later in 1959. However, according to documents from the Nobel Archive in Stockholm, Blixen was not awarded the prize in 1959 – despite having the committee’s majority support.

... In 1959, Blixen was in the running against 55 other authors from around the world, including Graham Greene, André Malraux and John Steinbeck. When the Committee whittled down the list to just four, Blixen’s name was the top choice.

‘I would stress, that if the prize should go to the now 74-year-old author, it should happen without delay,’ wrote then Committee member Anders Österling, nominating Blixen as his first choice.

Other Committee members Sigfrid Siwertz and Hermann Gullberg followed suit.

But the Committee’s final member, Eyvind Johnson, lobbied for Italian candidate and eventual winner Salvatore Quasimodo to take the prize, saying that Scandinavian authors had won the literature award four times as many times as those of other nationalities.

The pitch hit home with members of the voting Academy and Quasimodo was chosen as the recipient. According to Espmark, Johnson’s proposal played on the guilty conscience of members.

While there was a large showing of Scandinavians among laureates, Blixen, who died in 1962, would've been only the fifth woman to have the honor if she'd won the Nobel Prize in 1959. She never did win the award. (Steinbeck got the Nobel in 1962, though Greene and Malraux never won either.) But as The Literary Saloon points out, Mr. Eyvind Johnson eventually got his--he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1974 (sharing it with Harry Martinson) with, presumably, nary a word about the award's over-indulgence of Scandinavian writers.

Besides Out of Africa (and the companion volume, Shadows of the Grass) Blixen also wrote Seven Gothic Tales, Winter's Tales, Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard, and Last Tales. Other writing of hers was posthumously collected as Daguerreotypes and Other Essays and Carnival: Entertainments and Posthumous Tales.

The Nation published one of my favorite recent re-visitations of the strange and intoxicating work of Karen Blixen: "In the Theater of Isak Dinesen."

Comments

[Elizabeth]

When Hemingway won (not sure of the date?), he famously said that Dinesen deserved it.