Nobel Prize controversy

He not only gets a gold medal, but also $1.4 million check.

"This is an upset," says Patrick Henry Bass, Senior Editor at "Essence" magazine.  "The short list was Amos Oz; it was Haruki Murakami the Japanese writer; it was Adonis — who everyone thought was going to get the Nobel Prize — the Syrian poet.  

"Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian writer, was seen as a shoe-in. There was a lot of controversy over this particular Nobel in literature for 2008 because one of the Swedish judges said some unfortunate words."

Le Clézio who is described by the Nobel committee as someone who has been writing since they were 7 or 8. There was a survey in the 90s done in France that named him among 13% of the population as the most gifted French writer alive.

Bass says: "[Le Clézio] has published at least thirty books in France, and the French do revere their writers, they really do. In ways that sometimes, I think, Americans don’t."

The Nobel Prize for literature has never been a popularity contest. The Nobel committee takes it as a matter of honor to introduce writers to the world of readers, as much as honoring readers who are blockbuster famous already.

The controversey centered on Horace Engdahl, secretary of the Nobel committee for literature, who said that American writers were too provincial: "too isolated, too insular … too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture."