First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio? Yup, it’s Nobel Prize time.

1. Which of the following writers won the Nobel Prize for Literature: Kafka, Conrad, Borges, Greene, Auden, Proust, Joyce, Pound, Nabokov, Virgina Woolf, Akhmatova, Babel? That’s right - none.

2. Which of the following writers didn’t win the Nobel Prize for Literature: Sully Prudhomme, Frederic Mistral, Brecht,  Jose Echegaray, Henryk Sinkiewicz, Anton Chekhov, Paul Heyse, Verner von Heidenstam, Henrik Ibsen? Yup: Chekhov, Brecht and Ibsen.

3. Which country has prooduced the most Nobel prizewinning authors? Yes, of course, the perfidious French with 13 (plus two exiles - Milosz and Gao Xingjian from China.

4. Runner-up? Well, the USA (8 + four born overseas), but if you put the Scandinavian countries together they sweep home with 12 + one exile).

5. Did I hear anyone say Eurocentric? of the first 30 how many were from outside Europe? Two (Tagore and Sinclair Lewis)

6. What happened to the Germans? Seven Nobel Prizes for Literature for Germans who lived in Germany pre-1933 and two for Germans who lived in Germany in the 75 years since 1933 (Grass and Boll).

7. Which famous writers were awarded the Nobel prize but turned it down? TS Eliot? Thomas Mann?  Sartre? or Pasternak in 1958? It was Sartre in 1964.

8. Which great children’s writers have won the Nobel Prize? Was it AA Milne, Kenneth Grahame, JK Rowling, JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis or the Swedish writer, Astrid Lindgren? No, none of them.

9. How about crime, spy or sci-fi writers? Nope.

10. Men 94 Women 11.