Introduction to the Special Issue: “Literary Prize Culture in the Nordic Countries”

When the Swedish Academy's permanent secretary stepped through the trademark wooden door in Börshuset on October 5, 2023 and announced that the Nobel Prize had been awarded to “the Norwegian author Jon Fosse, for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable” (Announcement, 2023), it did not come as a complete surprise. After all, Fosse had been placed among the leading contenders for the prize by bookmakers and critics for about a decade, and the general theme of the public reactions to the announcement was that a worthy laureate had indeed been chosen. The author himself was, in his own introverted way, clearly proud of the award. And, of course, it bolstered national pride too. While the Norwegian prime minister was quick to congratulate Fosse on X, formerly Twitter, on behalf of the entire nation (Støre, 2023), the Norwegian press hailed the prize as crowning “a new Norwegian golden age in literature” (Ellefsen, 2023). On a national level, it was also a great day for Nynorsk, the second official standard of the Norwegian language used by 10%–15% of the population, including Fosse. In his first interview as a Nobel laureate, only minutes after the announcement, Fosse spoke warmly of the Nynorsk language and literary tradition (Fosse, 2023; see also Hottner, 2024, who gives a lucid account of this interview), and the fact that he was the first ever Nobel laureate to write in Nynorsk was reiterated even in the international press. In the run-up to the announcement, however, many commentators had predicted that the prize would be conferred on a non-European author, given the number of European laureates in recent years. Against this backdrop, Fosse's award came to evoke ideas of the Nordic countries, often also referred to as Norden, as constituting both a geographic region and a cultural community. One of the first reactions from Börshuset in Swedish television's live broadcast, switching between a studio panel and interviews on the scene, was that the prize “didn't just go to Europe, it went to Norden” (“det gick inte bara till Europa, det gick till Norden”; SVT, 2023, 23:07). Later that day, The Guardian published an article maintaining that “in Fosse, the prize went not just to a European author but a deeply Nordic one,” while also paraphrasing Norway as a “Nordic state” (Oltermann, 2023). And adopting a formulation by the news agency Associated Press, numerous papers around the world even attributed “Nordicness” to Fosse's style, praising him as a “master of spare Nordic writing.”1 All at once, Fosse was taken to represent not only Norway and Nynorsk, as one might easily expect in this context, but the entire Nordic region. Among all the other things the Nobel Prize for 2023 can be taken to exemplify, it thus emerges as an example of “scale shifting” (Levitt, 2020; Sievers & Levitt, 2020) or “scale bending” (Smith, 2004) in the realm of literature, testifying to the persistence of Norden as a frame of reference in literary culture. Geographically speaking, the Nordic countries comprise Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden as well as the autonomous territories of the Faroe Islands, Greenland, and Åland. This special issue will not attempt to unpack the “long and complicated history of defining the Nordic region and talking about things as Nordic” (Strang, Marjanen, & Hilsen, 2021, 4), on which a rich literature already exists. Rather, it aims to deepen our understanding of the workings of literary prizes in the region—of which the Nobel as a Swedish “world prize” (cf. Sneis & Spoerhase, 2023a, 148) is certainly the most widely known, while being only the tip of the iceberg—and to open up new avenues of research on this supranational “scale” of cultural identity, activity, and recognition. A massive increase in the number of literary prizes and a growing impact of prizes on field dynamics have been global trends since the beginning of the twentieth century (English, 2005; Marsden, 2020). This very much includes the Nordic countries (e.g., Handesten, 2020; Määttä, 2010), causing some observers to worry “We are drowning in literary prizes” (Bergmo & Nordenborg, 2011). Experience tells us, and research has shown, what literary prizes can be: signifiers or even arbiters of literary value and taste (Marsden, 2020), which function as “shorthand for literary merit” (Squires, 2013, 291) and not only affect the reception of individual authors and their works but also co-structure the very cultural and socio-economic space in which literature circulates and literary value is produced, negotiated, and institutionalized (cf. Squires, 2004; see also, e.g., Leypoldt, 2023; Sapiro, 2023). But what exactly characterizes the ecology of literary prizes and prize culture in the Nordic countries? In approaching this question, it is worth considering that prizes take part in the cultural construction of Norden (cf. Sørensen & Stråth, 1997). In her influential work on world literature, Pascale Casanova has argued that the Nobel Prize, with its (nearly) global reach, must be seen as “a prime, objective indicator of the existence of a world literary space” (Casanova, 2005, 75, expanding on Casanova, 1999/2004). By the same token, it can be argued that a “Nordic literary space” is both indexed and upheld by prizes and the prestige they carry. Some of the most prestigious and recognizable literary prizes in the region are pan-Nordic awards, such as the Swedish Academy's Nordic Prize, often referred to as the “little Nobel Prize;” the Glass Key Award for crime fiction, a genre that in turn is known to carry imaginaries of “the Nordic” in the global marketplace of letters (e.g., Nilsson, 2016); and of course the Nordic Council Literature Prize, at once “a remnant of the dream of a pan-Nordic book market” (Skei, 2011) and perhaps the most potent symbol of Nordic cultural cooperation (Mai, 2016; Strang, 2016). Literary prizes, then, make an intriguing case for the study of Nordic literary culture and cultural identity in general. In addition, these pan-Nordic awards pose questions about prize hierarchies, authors' careers, and the accumulation of symbolic capital on a transnational level. It is perhaps more than a side note that both Nordic recipients of the Nobel Prize in recent times, Jon Fosse (in 2023) and Tomas Tranströmer (in 2011), had been awarded both the Nordic Council Literature Prize and the Swedish Academy's Nordic Prize prior to the Nobel and after receiving several national awards. This is not to say that the “Nordic literary space” indexed by prizes is in every way cohesive or that one should speak of “Nordic literary prize culture” in the singular. While some awards are international, and while literary culture sometimes does cut across national borders (consider, for instance, Sámi literature or Finnish writers working in Swedish), most of the region's prizes presumably operate within a national context. Still, there is a case to be made for the Nordic countries as a frame of comparison in literary prize scholarship, in much the same way they have in fact already been regularly compared in terms of various cultural and political affairs. Consider, for example, how the Nordic countries share similar cultural policies—with bearings, one might add, in Bourdieusian terminology, on the structure of their respective national literary fields (e.g., in the case of Norway, Rønning & Slaatta, 2019; Halvorsen, Neple, & Bjerke, 2020). Despite some notable differences, it is common to speak of a “Nordic cultural model” (Duelund, 2003; for a critical re-evaluation, see Mangset, Kangas, Skot-Hansen, & Vestheim, 2008), which may ultimately turn out to be a model with five exceptions (cf. Christiansen & Petersen, 2001, 153, referring to the Nordic welfare model) but still displays comparable traits in the institutional orders in which literary prizes perform their roles. Projects in literary history with similar interests to this special issue—such as Nordic Literature: A Comparative History, which seeks to “examine the region's shared processes of literary production and communication without minimizing their diversity” (Sondrup & Sandberg, 2017, 1)—place little emphasis on the consecrating agents (such as prizes) that influence the collective processes of assigning value to literature. But if it is true that prizes are “the single best instrument for negotiating transactions between cultural and economic, cultural and social, or cultural and political capital” (English, 2005, 10), they offer special insights into many aspects of literary life and warrant further attention. As always, we are standing on the shoulders of giants. The contributors to this special issue can build on the pioneering international research on prizes and prize culture that has developed over the last couple of decades (e.g., Childress, Rawlings, & Moeran, 2017; English, 2002, 2005; Heinich, 2009; Squires, 2004). They can also draw on overviews of the literary prize landscape in some of the Nordic countries, the most comprehensive of which is Jerry Määttä's survey of literary prizes in Sweden (Määttä, 2010; see also Handesten, 2020; Liet, 2009; Riitamaa, 2022) as well as studies of individual prizes (e.g., Määttä, 2018, on the August Prize) and certain types of prizes (e.g., Svahn, 2021, on translation awards). Yet despite the important work that has been done thus far, research on literary prize culture in the Nordic countries turns out still to be surprisingly sparse overall.2 This special issue wants to uncover new aspects of the literary prize as a cultural phenomenon in the region and to point out paths for future research. The articles are based on papers presented at a conference that took place in October 2023 at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, entitled “Literary Prize Culture in the Nordic Countries. Prizes as Engines of Comparison.” It was organized by Jørgen Sneis as a member of the Collaborative Research Center (SFB) 1288 “Practices of Comparing” at Bielefeld University, which is funded by the German Research Foundation. I would like to thank Christian Benne, editor of Orbis Litterarum, for the opportunity to bring the articles to the pages of the journal and the reviewers for their time and productive feedback on the manuscripts.