8 deserving authors who never got the Nobel

On October 7, Tanzanian author Abdulrazak Gurnah won the 2021 Nobel Prize in literature, with the Swedish Academy citing his work as "uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents."

Gurnah, who recently retired as a professor of postcolonial literature at the University of Kent, has published 10 novels and a number of short stories. He is best known for his 1994 novel “Paradise”, set in colonial East Africa during World War I, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction.

Today, when Gurnah is being called one of the world's most prominent post-colonial writers by people all over the world, there are and there have been many literary luminaries that equally deserve a Nobel Prize. However, due to several undecipherable reasons, they never ever had the chance to receive it. Here is a look at a few of them.

A prolific English writer, H.G. Wells wrote in many genres including history, politics, social commentaries, textbooks, novels, and science fiction. In fact, his contribution to the genre of science fiction earned him the tag "The Father of Science Fiction." A futurist, he wrote a number of utopian works and foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television, and something resembling the World Wide Web. The science fiction historian John Clute describes Wells as "the most important writer the genre has yet seen", and notes his work has been central to both British and American science fiction. Despite all his achievements, Wells never won the Nobel Prize. He was nominated for it in 1921, 1932, 1935, and 1946.

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Hardly the 21st-century-world has seen an author as dynamic and brilliant as Sir Salman Rushdie. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, being knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, being elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and The Times ranking him thirteenth on its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945 - there is nothing Rushdie doesn't have to win the Nobel Prize! Furthermore, Salman Rushdie has received many plaudits for his writings, including the European Union's Aristeion Prize for Literature, the Premio Grinzane Cavour (Italy), and the Writer of the Year Award in Germany, and many of literature's highest honors.

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Also read: May return to India for my next novel: Rushdie

Murakami, who is best known for his 1987 bestseller “Norwegian Wood,” first emerged as a viable contender for the Nobel Prize in around 2007, when a prominent betting site placed him as one of the top contenders. Since then, his name has become a fixture on the list of hopefuls, increasing fans’ expectations and turning speculation about his Nobel Prize possibility into an annual affair. Interestingly, a recent article in The Japan Times may have deduced the possible reason behind this: "Over the years, critics have cited a number of possible reasons, with the most prominent being the lack of political statements in his [Murakami] work."

"In recent years, the Swedish Academy has been said to gravitate toward authors whose works are politically laudable, favoring authors who shed light on the downtrodden and those who fight oppressive rulers or tackle contemporary social issues head-on. Such elements underlie the works of this year’s laureate [Gurnah], too," it added.

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Achebe, who passed away in 2013, is regarded as the most dominant figure in modern African literature. His first novel "Things Fall Apart" remains the most widely studied, translated, and read African novel. Despite him being a pioneer of African literature, Achebe was never even nominated for the Nobel Prize.

A 2013 article titled 'Why Achebe was denied the Nobel Prize!' in the NewAfrican read, "Achebe was denied the Nobel Prize, but so also was the English writer Graham Greene, and one or two others that should have got it. The unofficial deduction that I have heard over and over again for such an unfair denigration is simply that, in the case of these two at least, they were too committed in their support of the oppressed to serve the interest of the big powers. Just as it is true that such great writers are the targets of the powers they try to rein in, so also is it true that no truly important writer has failed in the end to secure his/ her own niche in history, whatever his/her contemporaries may do."

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English writer and poet D.H. Lawrence's works represent, among other things, an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialization. Sadly, at the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. However, E.M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." Furthermore, the most influential advocate of Lawrence's literary reputation was Cambridge literary critic F. R. Leavis, who asserted that the author had made an important contribution to the tradition of English fiction.

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Over seven decades of literary activity, R.K. Narayan produced fourteen novels, countless essays, and dozens of stories. He was the one who put modern Indian writing on the world map. Furthermore, it was he - two generations before Salman Rushdie - who began to produce the first world-renowned body of work not written in any of India’s many vernacular languages. In fact, Narayan's friend Graham Greene once remarked that thanks to his writing he had known what it was like to be Indian. In addition, V.S. Naipaul, in his 2001 essay 'The Master of Small Things', wrote: "Narayan has always struck me as a natural writer, someone who overcomes difficulties by not seeing that they exist; and perhaps it never occurred to him that the way he used English to describe provincial Indian life was magical.

Not only this, renowned British author Jeffrey Archer fiercely believes that Narayan deserved a Nobel Prize for his writings.

"His work is a work of a genius. He can take a small man living in a village and turn it into a brilliant story," said Archer in 2019 in an interview.

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Interestingly, archives opened in 2018 revealed that Graham Greene was a serious contender for the Nobel prize for literature in 1967. It should be noted that the Nobel prize nominations are only made public 50 years after the prize is awarded. Greene was supported by the committee’s chairman, Anders Osterling, who called him "an accomplished observer whose experience encompasses a global diversity of external environments, and above all the mysterious aspects of the inner world, human conscience, anxiety, and nightmares".

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Widely regarded as the best poet of the 20th century, Robert Frost won the Pulitzer Prize four times, a record which he shares with Eugene O’Neill who did win the Nobel Prize in 1936. Frost was dismissed because of his “advanced age” in 1961 (he was 86 at the time) with the jury deciding the American poet’s age was “a fundamental obstacle, which the committee regretfully found it necessary to state”.

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