Posted on January 6, 2022 at 11:48 AM by Sadye Scott-Hainchek

The Swedish Academy, as is tradition, has unveiled the archives from the 1971 Nobel Prize for Literature deliberations, now that fifty years have passed.

That year, the winner was Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, and the cause for concern over is candidacy was his “communist tendencies,” according to the Guardian, citing a Swedish journalist who reviewed the papers.

The judges in particular highlighted prize founder Alfred Nobel’s direction that an award go to “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.”

The 1971 archives also include information on other candidates for the prize; those ninety nominees included W.H. Auden, James Baldwin, Philip Larkin, Jorge Luis Borges, André Malraux and just one woman: Estonian poet Marie Under.

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Categories: Today in Books

Tagged As: Awards, Poetry, The Guardian

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