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
Georg Büchner Prize for potential future Nobel Prize winners writing in the German language. Most recently, however, the Swedish Academy in Stockholm preceded the German Academy for Language and Literature in awarding a prolific writer from the German "sprachraum". Herta Müller received the Nobel Prize in Literature but has not yet been awarded the Georg Büchner Prize. Other writers who were omitted but received the Nobel Prize in Literature were Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, and Nelly Sachs. Georg Büchner Prize The Georg Büchner Prize () is the most important literary prize for the German language, along with the Goethe Prize. The award is