The politics of Nobel Prizes

Jorge Luis Borges was one of the greatest writers never to win a Nobel Prize (try the early short fiction if you don’t already know his work). Now I know why:

The visit to [Pinochet’s] Chile finished off Borges’s chances of ever winning the Nobel Prize. That year, and for the remaining years of his life, his candidacy was opposed by a veteran member of the Nobel Prize committee, the socialist writer Arthur Lundkvist, a long-standing friend of the Chilean Communist poet Pablo Neruda, who had received the Nobel Prize in 1971. Lundkvist would subsequently explain to Volodia Teitelboim, one of Borges’s biographers and a onetime chairman of the Chilean Communist Party, that he would never forgive Borges his public endorsement of General Pinochet’s regime.

Borges, it should be noted, did believe in democracy but thought Pinochet the best of the available options at the time. For purposes of contrast, consider the following (slightly overstated) description of Laureate Pablo Neruda:

On the eve of his [Neruda’s] death, in 1973, he could still describe Stalin as “that wise, tranquil Georgian”. His feelings were similarly soft for Mao’s China, where he loved to see everyone in those vast landscapes and streetscapes dressed in regulation blue.

The former quotation is from p.426 of Edwin Williamson’s excellent Borges: A Life.

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