Alice Munro - Nobel Prize for Literature

[The Brain]

He's trolling you.

Why so hostile?

Thanks for pointing that out, I wouldn't have got it otherwise; nice droll humour from Jacob.

Why so hostile?

[Syt]

Canadian literature is far, far better than Canadian tv/movies.

Have to admit I have not read any Alice Munro however.

Oh dear god, Canuck TV/movies.

Just don't insult their beer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HGPh8Hjyg8

[OttoVonBismarck]

I used to think the Nobel in Literature was one of the stupidest of the prizes, because of all the shenanigans (especially the huge proportion of Scandinavian authors who have won it, relative to their extremely small proportion of global population.) But at some point I recognized that an international prize in literature with a selection committee like the Nobel's is really just not that valid of a prize anyway. No matter how versed you are in other languages, it's hard to ever truly appreciate literature in a foreign tongue, and translations often miss the mark for cultural reasons even when they are still very good. So you're just going to expect a strong bias inherent to the people making the selection for stuff they "understand" and additionally a strong bias to works that lend themselves better to "internationalization", which isn't the same as "the best works of literature.

So yes, I think respective national-level prizes are more prestigious. If I was an American author I'd take more pride in winning a Pulitzer than winning the Nobel, in fact if I was an American author who won the Nobel in Literature I'd wager my writings would be something no American had ever read, and the ones who did would find it unreadable gibberish.

I've not read Alice Munro by the way, but I have at least heard of her--a first in many years for me for a Nobel Laureate in Literature.