Readers Don't Need the Nobel Prize in Literature
The cancellation of the 2018 award is an opportunity to remember that great works of writing aren’t decided by committee.
You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone, Joni Mitchell told us. So now that the Nobel Prize in Literature is gone—the 2018 prize will be postponed, as the Swedish Academy deals with the —it seems worth asking what, exactly, the prize gives us. Will we miss it this October, when the chemists and physicists and economists are buzzing about their laureates, and the writers are left out? Some people will, surely—the publishers who capitalize on the prize to sell the winner’s foreign rights, and the journalists for whom it provides an annual headline. And of course
