January 8, 2016
Nobel Prize archive reveals list of losers, including Borges, Nabokov, Neruda and more
by Chad Felix
Yesterday, as reported by Alison Flood for The Guardian, the Academy revealed the 89 other writers who were in the running for the Nobel Prize that year. Unsurprisingly, the losers are great. (Trust us, we know some great losers.) The hitherto confidential list—the Academy keeps the names of contenders secret for fifty years after the announcement—is a veritable who’s who of important midcentury writers.
Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, and Pablo Neruda were all contenders. As were W.H. Auden, Anna Ahkmatova, Martin Buber,Georges Simenon, Ezra Pound, and Theodor Adorno. Oh, and Samuel Beckett is listed, too—he went on to win the prize four years later, in 1969.
Actually, many of the 1965 candidates went on to win the prize in later years—Shmuel Yosef Agnon and Nelly Sachs in 1966, Miguel Ángel Asturias Rosales in 1967, Pablo Neruda in 1971, and Heinrich Böll in 1972. Again, this isn’t surprising. What is surprising, however, is that the prize ultimately eluded Vladimir Nabokov, W.H. Auden, and Jorge Luis Borges.