Nobel Prize in Literature publicly available at The Nomination Database for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Currently, only nominations submitted between 1901 and 1968 are available for public viewing. This secrecy has led to speculation about the next Nobel laureate. According to Göran Malmqvist of the Swedish Academy, Chinese writer Shen Congwen was to have been awarded the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature, had he not suddenly died that year. From 1901 to 1912, the committee, headed by the conservative Carl David af Wirsén, weighed the literary quality of a work against its contribution towards humanity's struggle 'toward the ideal'. Tolstoy, Ibsen, Zola, and
Nobel Prize in Literature should have been rewarded instead of, for instance, Sully Prudhomme, Eucken, and Heyse". There are omissions which are beyond the control of the Nobel Committee such as the early death of an author as was the case with Marcel Proust, Italo Calvino, and Roberto Bolaño. According to Kjell Espmark "the main works of Kafka, Cavafy, and Pessoa were not published until after their deaths and the true dimensions of Mandelstam's poetry were revealed above all in the unpublished poems that his wife saved from extinction and gave to the world long after he had perished in his Siberian exile". British