(2005-12-08) — The Swedish Academy announced today that starting next year it would grant Nobel Prizes in literature without regard to whether the nominees have written anything.
The news comes just a day after Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter used his acceptance speech as an opportunity to excoriate the United States for 60 years of “vicious, remorseless” and criminal foreign policy that uses the massacre of innocent people to advance the cause of democracy.
Announcing the qualifications change, a spokesman for the Nobel committee said, “We now feel that it’s intolerant and discriminatory to limit the literature prize to someone who actually has produced a body of excellent written work. We wonder how many people with anti-American bias as strong as Mr. Pinter’s have been cheated out of a global platform for their views just because they’ve never written anything more than a threatening note to the White House, a bit of subway graffiti or a column for The New York Times.”
President George Bush, when asked for a reaction to Mr. Pinter’s attack, said, “I haven’t heard the speech yet, so I’ll have to wait until the DNC releases the Cliffs Notes.”
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