section_path: Criticism
section_name: Criticism
paragraph_text: Criticism
  
  Although the Nobel Prize in Literature is widely regarded as the world's most prestigious literary prize, the Swedish Academy has attracted significant criticism for its handling of the award. Many authors who have won the prize have fallen into obscurity, while others rejected by the jury remain widely studied and read. In the Wall Street Journal, Joseph Epstein wrote, "You might not know it, but you and I are members of a club whose fellow members include Leo Tolstoy, Henry James, Anton Chekhov, Mark Twain, Henrik Ibsen, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov. The club is the Non-Winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature. All these authentically great writers, still alive when the prize, initiated in 1901, was being awarded, didn't win it." Other notable names from the non-western canon who were ignored despite being nominated several times for the prize include Sri Aurobindo and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. The prize has "become widely seen as a political one – a peace prize in literary disguise", whose judges are prejudiced against authors with political tastes different from theirs. Tim Parks has expressed skepticism that it is possible for "Swedish professors... compar a poet from Indonesia, perhaps translated into English with a novelist from Cameroon, perhaps available only in French, and another who writes in Afrikaans but is published in German and Dutch...". As of 2021, 16 of the 118 recipients have been of Scandinavian origin. The Academy has often been alleged to be biased towards European, and in particular Swedish, authors.
  
  Nobel's "vague" wording for the criteria for the prize has led to recurrent controversy. In the original Swedish, the word idealisk translates as "ideal." The Nobel Committee 's interpretation has varied over the years. In recent years, this means a kind of idealism championing human rights on a broad scale.