Fifty years after Samuel Beckett won the Nobel prize for literature, newly opened archives reveal the serious doubts the committee had over giving the award to an author they felt held a “bottomless contempt for the human condition”. But with Nobel archives only being made public after 50 years, documents have now revealed there were major disagreements within the Swedish Academy over the choice of the Irish writer. But Beckett’s main supporter on the committee, Karl Ragnar Gierow, felt that Beckett’s “black vision” was “not the expression of animosity and nihilism”. Beckett was rejected for the prize a year earlier in 1968, but a year later his champions won out. That was done by Gierow, who expanded on the arguments he made to the committee, saying that Beckett’s work goes “to the depths” because “it is only there that pessimistic thought and poetry can work their miracles.

Source: The Guardian January 17, 2020 06:00 UTC