What do Amos Oz and J.M. Coetzee have in common? posted 10/8/2009 2:32:49 PM | 1 kudo what's this?     report abuse

eastham

Well aside from being writers with well-deserved reputations, they were both front-runners for major literary prizes and each lost to a lesser known woman.

Today, the Swedish Academy announced that Herta Müller, rather than the odds on favorite Oz, was the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Oz, whose work has been published in 30 languages, is the author of nearly 20 books and hundreds of essays. The bookmakers had heavy odds in Oz’s favor, but he’ll have to wait another year.

Herta Müller is an ethnic German, whose father was in the SS. She was born in a German enclave in Romania and her writings document the horrors of the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu. Müller was a member of the dissident writers’ group, Aktionsgruppe Banat, and was eventually exiled to Germany. In 1982, Müller wrote her first work, a series of short stories that were censored by the Romanian government. Her first book, Nadirs¸ was smuggled out of Romania and published in Germany. The Land of Green Plums is considered her best work and one of only five translated into English. Müller becomes the 13th German writer to win the Nobel, last won by German Günter Grass in 1999. She is only the 12th woman to receive the prize.

Coetzee, who has won two Man Booker prizes, was thought to be the winner of an unprecedented third this year, but it was not to be. Hillary Mantel won this year’s prize for Wolf Hall, a historical novel about Henry VIII’s Machiavellian advisor Thomas Cromwell. The vote was a split decision, 3-2. Not only has Mantel, who is working on a sequel to Wolf Hall, upset Coetzee, but Dan Brown as well. Orders for Wolf Hall have increased 1,500% since the winning the prize and Brown has fallen to #2 on Amazon’s best-seller list.

I read the first chapters of Müller’s The Appointment on Amazon. From what I’ve read, it is a wonderful book. She has a real facility for language. I expect her German publishers will be re-printing her work and her books will be more readily available on Amazon and the shelves of your local bookstore. Mantel’s Wolf Hall goes on sale here October 13th and I’m looking forward to reading it.

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