This year, the Swedish Academy is not awarding a Nobel Prize in Literature. This is due to some controversy causing several board members to resign. Fortunately, some incredible people took action, creating The New Academy. Also based in Sweden, The New Academy was formed solely to award The New Academy Prize in Literature. According to the description on the voting page, “[o]ur ambition is to select a winning author who has given people stories about the humans of our world.” You can find out more on thier page https://www.dennyaakademien.com/
The most interesting part is that they opened up the list of nominees to world-wide voting, from August 14. The top 4 authors moved on to final judging by an expert panel/jury.
Personally, I am not that well read to have recognized many of the authors, and since the list of nominees came from Swedish Librarians, I am willing to bet many Americans only recognize a few names, too. As much as I love Rowlings and Gaiman (both made the nominee list), I thought it would be a good idea to investigate some of what the other authors have written, especially since the award should be given to someone who has “given people stories about the humans of our world.” However, The New Academy does not include a bio or links to their works. So, I had good intentions to included a title and a link to either Amazon, Wikipedia, or another list of their works in a post.
Here it is October and I barely made a dent in the list. The award ceremony is October 12 (today!). So I moved the list to a static page and will continue to update it there: Nominees
The 3 finalists are:
- Condé, Maryse – Guadeloupe
- Gaiman, Neil – Great Britain
- Thúy, Kim – Canada
And the winner is:
Go watch the video stream here : https://youtu.be/hcZfCvYhX6M
Ok, I’ll tell you……
It is Maryse Condé of Guadeloupe.
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