From a global perspective, awarding two European writers yet again is just a failure.
From a purely literary perspective, Handke is a great and influential writer, who was a hot candidate for a long time. For his work, I think the award is justified.
On a personal level, his ex-wife accused him of physical abuse, he held a eulogy for a war criminal, was known for cursing and berating his audience, ...
If he still should have received it regardless depends on a difficult value judgement: do you purely choose based on a writers work, or does his personality influence the decision?
I can get behind excluding individual authors from the award for being terrible people, but I can't get behind purposely giving the award to someone that's not European if Europeans would have otherwise deserved it based solely on the merits of their writing.
There's plenty of amazing things written by non-white people. However, the Nobel prize for literature should remain a pure meritocracy as much as possible.
That's not to say that its a perfect system. If you point to any given year you can likely find examples of written works that didn't get the award but are arguably as good if not better.
If you intentionally limit the pool of potential awardees to people that are not white, you make a mockery of the award and it loses any sense of prestige or credibility, even if the non-white awardee was truly the best writer. Not only are you discriminating against certain people, you are also doing a disservice to the very people you want to help.
I think a better solution would be to try and make sure the people involved in the process aren't heavily biased towards any specific demographic of authors.
There are probably additional ways to improve the system, but I think if we want the award to mean anything they have to be focused on eliminating discrimination, rather than using it as a tool to generate an equality in outcomes.
Edit: I should note that this reflects my thoughts on prestigious awards being meritocracies, it doesn't reflect my thoughts anything else, there are lots of complicated issues such as affirmative action, university quotas, etc. That I am not making a comment about because I don't know what the optimal solution is to solving those problems.
What do you think about the critiques of our understanding of merit - specifically the idea that our cultural experiences bias our understanding and perception of excellence?
I.e. If all your examples of good writing are written by a european for other europeans, you will likely associate some cultural practices that aren't required for good writing with your understanding of "good writing." The whole idea of developing taste is, of course, that it is somewhat subjective.
I think the idea of meritocracy is one worth pursuing, but I think modern advocates for it as a thing that actually exists today should engage more energetically with the critiques of it in practice.
> What do you think about the critiques of our understanding of merit - specifically the idea that our cultural experiences bias our understanding and perception of excellence?
I think everyone is biased and that objective thinking is a learned skill that you have to constantly re-evaluate. No one will ever be perfectly unbiased or anywhere near it. Even when you are practicing objective thinking honestly and correctly, there are undoubtedly deeply ingrained biases that you can't shake and you may not even be able to know what those biases are.
However, I think through effort we can improve and minimize the impact of bias. Furthermore, over long periods of time, if we adopt a culture of doing this, it may actually reduce bias overall in the generations to come.
The simple version is I think we are not going to be perfect, but surely we can be better than we are if we try. I think that's better than attempting to prevent bias by introducing extreme forms of bias in the opposite direction.
> However, the Nobel prize for literature should remain a pure meritocracy as much as possible.
I don't think it's even remotely the case. If anything, just for the fact that literature cannot be measured independently of times, culture and circumstances. The idea of people in Oslo comparing the merits of an Italian poet with those of a playwright writing in Swahili is pretty ridiculous.
From a purely literary perspective, Handke is a great and influential writer, who was a hot candidate for a long time. For his work, I think the award is justified.
On a personal level, his ex-wife accused him of physical abuse, he held a eulogy for a war criminal, was known for cursing and berating his audience, ...
If he still should have received it regardless depends on a difficult value judgement: do you purely choose based on a writers work, or does his personality influence the decision?