Louise Gluck wins Nobel Prize

Recently we posted Louise Gluck’s poem Lamium and we’ve also posted excerpts from other poems in her collection The Wild Iris. She’s just won the Nobel Prize for Literature “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”

Not so Nobel

It seemed rather odd when it was announced that the Nobel Prize for Literature wouldn’t be awarded this year because of sex scandals surrounding the husband of a committee member.

Sunday Stir: Grumpy old man? Nordic Romantic?

 

Horace Engdahl of the Swedish Academy of Sciences has annoyed a lot of people with his comments that creative writing courses and writers’ grants are  undermining the richness and  imaginative range of today’s generation of writers. Writers, he thinks, have become institutionalised, and are locked into an unhealthy symbiosis with the literary institutions.