NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE

NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE: translation

The Nobel Prize for Literature is an international literary prize established in the will of Alfred Nobel to be awarded to an author who has produced “the most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency.” In 1968, Kawabata Yasunari became the first Japanese writer to win the prize “for his narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind.” In 1994, a second Japanese author, Oe Kenzaburo, was awarded the prize for creating “an imagined world where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today.” Each year a number of Japanese literary critics speculate on when the next Japanese Nobel laureate will be chosen, and who that might be.