Have you ever wondered how a Nobel Prize committee works? If so, then look no further than Swedish journalist Andreas Ekström, who has disinterred the 1961 literature panel’s minutes, the Guardian reports. There is little mystery: the judges convene to discuss nominees just as any other prize panel would, although with perhaps more self-regard than is customary. In 1961, for instance, the judges rejected Robert Frost and E.M. Forster for being too old, and Lawrence Durrell for his ‘monomaniacal preoccupation with erotic complications’. Italian novelist Alberto Moravia was overlooked because his prose amounted to ‘a general monotony’. What on earth would they have made of Umberto Eco?
The same panel blocked J.R.R. Tolkien’s candidacy because it felt that his style was substandard. Tolkien had been proposed by his fellow Inkling C.S. Lewis — a wonderful gesture of friendship of which Tolkien was probably unaware, such were the mores of the time.
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