Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded “to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction” according to the will of the Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel (https://www.nobelprize.org). The most recent Anglophone writer to receive this internationally esteemed award was the British-Zanzibari postcolonial novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents” in 2021. His works set in East Africa under British or German rule deal with themes of exile, migration, displacement, identity, and belonging. In advance, there had been heated debates about a lack of diversity considering the majority of winners had been European. The Emeritus Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures was the first Black writer to receive the prize since the African American novelist Toni Morrison in 1993 and the first African writer to win the award since the British-Zimbabwean author Doris Lessing in 2007.
This insinuated a renewed interest in the relation of the Nobel Prize and Postcolonialism. In this context, the Nigerian playwright, poet, and literary scholar, Wole Soyinka, who had actively campaigned for independence from British colonial rule was awarded the prize in 1986 for his works which deal with the conflicts between Western conventions and African culture. South African Nobel Prize Laureates Nadine Gordimer (1999) and J.M. Coetzee (2003) likewise contest the values resulting from the apartheid-system. Other Anglophone writers to win the Nobel Prize who have become famous postcolonial authors are the novelist and travel writer V.S. Naipaul (2001), born in Trinidad, and the playwright and poet Derek Walcott (1992) from St Lucia. All in all, the works of these Nobel Prize winners deal with pronounced postcolonial issues, such as alienation, hybridity, place, language, history, and rewriting. Moreover, this perspective particularly allows to re-read Seamus Heaney’s poetry on Ireland (1995) and Alice Munro’s short stories set in Canada (2013) in the context of (post)colonial politics and history. Beyond that, it brings to attention questions concerning the reception of Anglophone writers themselves, their impact on the global literary field, and their ability to shape transnational discourses, or influence the international literary marketplace. When the Australian novelist Patrick White received the Nobel Prize in 1973, the committee lauded him, for “introduc[ing] a new continent into literature”, while Australian literary critics saw the award as a confirmation of the national literature having overcome its colonial cultural cringe.
Thus, in this seminar, next to exploring the influential postcolonial voices of this selection of Anglophone writers, we will assess the “Nobel Prize effect” in terms of the contemporary literary marketplace and the economies of authorship as well as the commercialisation and exoticisation of the postcolonial. After familiarising ourselves with the nomination and selection process, our exemplary analyses of postcoloniality will also consider the Nobel Prize Lectures as well as the critical writing of the Nobel Prize laureates.