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Unrewarded: Great writers who never won the Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prize for Literature is considered the highest accolade to which a writer can aspire, but there is a long list of justly-deserving authors who have died without winning the award.
The Nobel Prize for Literature is considered the highest accolade to which a writer can aspire, but there is a long list of justly-deserving authors who have died without winning the award.
Everyone has their own favourite who never made it on to the laureates list, but there are a good many about whom no one with an interest in fiction would disagree. It has even been argued that, in not recognising literary talent of such stature, the Swedish Academy have devalued the prize rather than the reputation of the writers in question.
Among those considered in the running but who have died in the past few years was RK Narayan, a foremost Indian writer in English of whom his friend Graham Greene once remarked that thanks to his writing he had known what it was like to be Indian.
Canada's Robertson Davies was held in the highest esteem by those who read his Gargantuan but beautifully-crafted intellectual novels, and often cited as near-certainty for the prize, providing he did not, as he unfortunately did, die first.
The same could be said for Italian Giorgio Bassani, another recently-departed writer, whose Ferrara novels, in particular his masterpiece The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, have a sense of place and period almost unmatched in contemporary fiction.
Two other Canadians, Mordechai Richler and Irish-born Brian Moore, would also have been worthy laureates had they lived long enough.
But, arguably the two greatest writers of the 20th century not to be honoured have to be Argentina's Jorge Luis Borges, whose singular work, epitomised by his masterpiece Labyrinths, defies comparison, and Graham Greene, whose novels range over political and religious themes in settings as disparate as Papa Doc Duvalier's Haiti (The Comedians), West Africa (The Heart of the Matter and A Burnt-Out Case), Vietnam (The Quiet American) and wartime London (The End of the Affair and The Ministry of Fear).
It was often claimed that it was a personal vendetta by a member of the Nobel committee which prevented Greene receiving the award which was his due, and the choice of William Golding in 1983 was seen as a direct snub to the man who at the time was perhaps the greatest living writer in English.