Nobel Prize in Literature our age". Steinbeck himself, when asked if he deserved the Nobel on the day of the announcement, replied: "Frankly, no." In 2012 (50 years later), the Nobel Prize opened its archives and it was revealed that Steinbeck was a "compromise choice" among a shortlist consisting of Steinbeck, British authors Robert Graves and Lawrence Durrell, French dramatist Jean Anouilh and Danish author Karen Blixen. The declassified documents showed that he was chosen as the best of a bad lot: "There aren't any obvious candidates for the Nobel prize and the prize committee is in an unenviable situation," wrote committee member Henry
Nobel Prize controversies possibility is that Nobel did not consider mathematics as a practical discipline. Both the Fields Medal and the Abel Prize have been described as the "Nobel Prize of mathematics". The most notorious controversies have been over prizes for Literature, Peace and Economics. Beyond disputes over which contributor's work was more worthy, critics most often discerned political bias and Eurocentrism in the result. The interpretation of Nobel's original words concerning the Literature prize has also undergone repeated revisions. The 2008 prize was awarded to Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie and Roger Y. Tsien for their work on green fluorescent protein or GFP.