PARIS: More than any of the Nobel Prizes, with the possible exception of the Peace award, the Literature prize is a highly subjective affair.
The list of winners reveals that while some of the greatest writers of the past century have been honoured, they find themselves rubbing shoulders with many obscure and forgotten authors.
Alfred Nobel's initial intention was for the prize to be awarded to "the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction."
But nowadays the Swedish Academy which awards the prize has established it as more of a recognition for a lifetime of literary achievement, and in some cases can be seen to have used it as an instrument for making a political statement.
This was certainly the case in the award to dissident writers like China's Gao Xingjian in the year 2000, and, most famously, to Soviet writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn 30 years earlier.
And it was true to a degree of the 2004 award, too, for in naming Austrian writer and playwright Elfriede Jelinek, the academy chose a writer little-known outside her own country but one who has taken a strong political stand against the rise of the extreme right-- understandable in someone whose Czech-born father suffered at the hands of the Nazis in World War II.
From the first award to French poet Sully Prudhomme in 1901, the Nobel has read like an A to Z of modern classics, with a fair sprinkling of unlikely names thrown in for good measure.
No-one would deny the justification of rewarding writers of the calibre of Samuel Beckett (1969), Saul Bellow (1976), Albert Camus (1957), T.S. Eliot (1948), William Faulkner (1949), Andre Gide (1947), Nadine Gordimer (1991), Guenter Grass (1999), Ernest Hemingway (1954), Hermann Hesse (1946), Thomas Mann (1929), Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1982), Francois Mauriac (1952), Pablo Neruda (1971), Boris Pasternak (1958), Harold Pinter (2005), Luigi Pirandello (1934), George Bernard Shaw (1925), John Steinbeck (1962), Rabindranath Tagore (1913) and W.B. Yeats (1923).
But there have been some distinctly "second division" choices, too, as well as a number which raised eyebrows at the time and have since been regarded as distinctly wide of the mark.
From the ranks of the more controversial laureates, some have singled out American writer Pearl S. Buck (1938), Anatole France (1921) and English master of the middlebrow, John Galsworthy (1932).—AFP
