Literary Prize Culture in the Nordic Countries. Prizes as Engines of Comparison

The conference »Literary Prize culture in the Nordic Countries. Prizes as Engines of Comparison« was held at the Ludwig-Maximillians-Universität in Munich between the 5th and 7th October 2023, fittingly coinciding with the announcement of the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse as this year’s Nobel Prize winner. While the Swedish Nobel Prize is the best-known literary prize worldwide, receiving a massive amount of attention in the media each year, and research on the Nobel has been flourishing in recent times, the broader landscape of literary prizes in the Nordic countries has remained underexplored by scholars. The aim of the conference was to scrutinize the variety, functions, and significance of literary prizes in this region and to bring the ecology of literary prizes into sharper focus.