Award Season

So many, many posts I should be writing, but I'll try to get back on track with a relatively short post.

I was definitely off-base regarding Atwood and the Giller Prize, where she didn't make the short list.  However, as was just announced, she split the Booker Prize with Bernardine Evaristo.  This is causing a bit of a kerfuffle, as it was explicitly against the rules (changed after Barry Unsworth and Michael Ondaatje split the prize in 1992).  Now some are claiming this devalues Evaristo's win, which would have been the first for a Black female writer, though this begs the obvious question of how upset they would have been if Atwood had won the prize outright for The Descendants...  I don't know anything at all about Evaristo's novel, Girl, Woman, Other; I have to admit, it doesn't really sound like something I would enjoy, but I may get to it one of these days.

Still and all, this is nothing compared to the controversy surrounding the Nobel Prize for Literature where they had to award back-to-back awards, since the whole panel was under a heavy cloud and nearly disbanded last year (& without awarding the prize).  I did read Flights by Olga Tokarczuk and was thoroughly underwhelmed; I don't really understand why she won the prize.  However, this is nothing compared to the "furore" over Peter Handke's win; I must admit, given his adamant denial of the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and his advocacy on behalf of Milošević, Handke seems a particularly terrible choice for the Nobel Prize, and this selection really does devalue this prize for the next several years (and probably until this awards committee is finally broken up for good).  To be frank, I lost all respect for the Nobel literature committee back when they gave the prize to Bob Dylan, so this is no skin off my nose, but it definitely has a lot of other people upset.

I will say that the Nobel Peace Prize seems to have gone to a worthy candidate (Abiy Ahmed) for once, and even the economics prize seems to have gone to academics with real-world leanings and an interest in reducing poverty, so that is certainly better than giving it to a free marketer from the Chicago School.  I guess it is up to the literature prize committee to get its act together and stop being quite so clueless and embarrassing...