Nobel archives show Graham Greene might have won 1967 prize

Graham Greene and Jorge Luis Borges were serious contenders for the Nobel prize for literature in 1967, newly opened archives have revealed.

The Nobel prize nominations are only made public 50 years after the prize is awarded. The 1967 papers reveal the machinations that went on among the Nobel committee in choosing Guatemala’s Miguel Angel Asturias as their winner, an author they praised “for his vivid literary achievement, deep-rooted in the national traits and traditions of Indian peoples of Latin America”.

Seventy writers were nominated for the award, according to a document released by the Swedish Academy, among them Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, Lawrence Durrell, EM Forster, Georges Simenon, Ezra Pound and JRR Tolkien. But digging through the archives, the Svenska Dagbladet reveals that only a handful were in serious contention, including Borges, Asturias, Greene, WH Auden and the Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata, who would win the following year.

Greene was supported by the committee’s chairman, Anders Osterling, who called him “an accomplished observer whose experience encompasses a global diversity of external environments, and above all the mysterious aspects of the inner world, human conscience, anxiety and nightmares”. Osterling had doubts, writes Kaj Schueler, about the two Latin American authors, calling Asturias “too narrowly limited in his revolutionary subject world”, and Borges “too exclusive or artificial in his ingenious miniature art”.

Three other committee members disagreed, and Asturias would go on to take the prize. Schueler speculates that Greene may have lost support “because the academy slowly was orienting itself towards a more global outlook – it was after all the second half of the 1960s and the climate in western societies was more interested in everything outside Europe”. The Nobel committee never honoured Greene or Borges, two authors who are still widely read, while Asturias’s titles are more scarce.

Schueler said: “It is really exciting, and somewhat frustrating, to look into the old Nobel committee papers. Exciting because, if you are interested in history, you at least get some knowledge of the process, of different opinions and views. And it is really a journey back in history, in literary values of the time, in ways of expressing literary thoughts. When you read the material you also, if you are lucky, can sort of relive those years. But it is also frustrating because the papers from the Nobel committee only give you part of the answers.”

At BookRiot, M Lynx Qualey points out that of the 70 nominated writers in 1967, just five were women: Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Katherine Anne Porter, Anna Seghers, Judith Wright and Lina Kostenko. The most recent female winner, Svetlana Alexievich, who took the prize in 2015, was only the 14th woman to take the laurels since the prize was inaugurated in 1901.