Nobel Prize controversies been favored to receive the Prize, but a committee member was later quoted as saying that they would have been "too predictable, too popular." The 1974 prize was denied to Graham Greene, Vladimir Nabokov, and Saul Bellow in favor of a joint award for Swedish authors Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson—both Nobel judges and unknown outside their home country. Bellow won in 1976; neither Greene nor Nabokov took home the prize. The 1970 prize was awarded to Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who did not attend the ceremony in Stockholm for fear that the Soviet Union would prevent his return. His
Nobel Prize controversies forced to decline by threats of violence. Their refusal letters arrived in Stockholm after Domagk's refusal letter, helping to confirm suspicions that the German government had forced them to refuse the prize. In 1948, they wrote to the Academy expressing their gratitude for the prizes and their regret for being forced to refuse them in 1939. They were awarded their medals and diplomas at a ceremony in July 1949. Boris Pasternak at first accepted the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature, but was forced by Soviet authorities to decline, because the prize was considered a "reward for the dissident political innuendo