Irish prose fiction the literary technique known as "stream of consciousness", best exemplified in his famous work "Ulysses". Joyce also wrote "Finnegans Wake", "Dubliners", and the semi-autobiographical "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". "Ulysses", often considered to be the greatest novel of the 20th century, is the story of a day in the life of a city, Dublin. "Finnegans Wake" is written in an invented language which parodies English, Irish and Latin. Samuel Beckett (1906–1989), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, was born in Dublin but later moved to France. He wrote thereafter in French and English.
Nobel Prize in Literature previously little-known outside Germany but many times named favorite for the Nobel Prize, re-ignited the viewpoint that the Swedish Academy was biased and Eurocentric. The 2010 prize was awarded to Mario Vargas Llosa, a native of Peru in South America, a generally well-regarded decision. When the 2011 prize was awarded to the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Peter Englund said the prize was not decided based on politics, describing such a notion as "literature for dummies". The Swedish Academy awarded the next two prizes to non-Europeans, Chinese author Mo Yan and Canadian short story writer