Nobel winners are strange. I should know, I’ve met three of them

To meet one winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature would be seen by most bookish nerds like me as a real privilege; to meet two as extraordinarily lucky; but to enjoy extended encounters with three is surely very heaven. Such, however, has been my fortunate fate.

The Nobel Prize for Literature is the world’s most prestigious – and, as it comes with a hefty cash bonus, the second most lucrative – award for fine writing. Inaugurated at the dawn of the 20th century by the Swedish industrialist and inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel (to atone for a lifetime manufacturing munitions) the prize is one of five awarded annually every autumn by the Swedish Academy. The others are for physics, chemistry, medicine and – most controversially – peace.

Often criticised for Eurocentricity, for neglecting women and Third World writers, the Swedes have occasionally got it right (Yeats, Camus, Hemingway and Beckett), but have just as frequently missed big fish (Proust, Joyce, Hardy and Auden) in favour of obscure and little-read authors – often from Scandinavia itself.