One more year, the Nobel Prizes are awarding the most outstanding of the world of Medicine, Chemistry, Physics, Peace, Economics and Literature. In this last field, there is always speculation with many candidates to win the award, which in this 2021 does not have a clear favorite. Like every year, classic writers like Haruki Murakami appear in the bets.
Japanese is a fixture every time the prestigious Swedish Academy Awards are awarded, but it has never won the award. For years he has always appeared in the pools as a favorite, along with other writers such as Maryse Condé or the Kenyan Ngugi Wa Thiongo, but it has never been his year.
In this 2021 the names of the Canadian Anne Carson, Margaret Atwood or the Russian Lyudmila Ulitskaya are very familiar. Will this year be the year of Murakami?
Why has Murakami never won the Nobel Prize for Literature?
Japanese is one of the most famous contemporary writers in the world. He started writing when he was 30 years old, after a kind of ‘vision’ on a baseball field that prompted him to write.
Years later, Murakami has been translated into more than 40 languages, and has won such prestigious awards as the Kafka Prize or the Hans Christian Andersen. His books are sold by the millions – ‘Tokyo Blues’ has sold more than four million copies since 1983 – and in Japan he is an institution of letters.
Why did you resist the Nobel Prize for Literature? For many critics and specialists in literature, the fame of the writer, who has become a best-seller, may be one of the reasons for not winning the Nobel . The professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Washington University, Ignacio Sánchez Pardo, applies this theory as a factor so that Murakami does not win the Nobel Prize. “Writers who achieve best-seller status do not usually win the Nobel Prize for Literature,” he explained in an interview for Mexico’s El Universal.
Others suggest that Murakami himself would not even do well to win the nobel for his own fame. Nobody remembers the Nobel winners the following year, or at least most of them. Murakami’s fame will remain intact year after year, even if he doesn’t win the award.
This year it is again strong in the bets after publishing in 2020 ‘First person singular’ , although the public sees it more and more distant. It has already happened with other great writers who never savored the Nobel Prize for Literature, such as Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie or Umberto Eco himself.
