A Prize That Shies From Predictability

Description

winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature isnt always a bolt-out-of-the-blue surprise, a writer whose work is known only to an elite fraction of American readers. It only seems that way. Since 2000, after all, Nobel recipients have included VS Naipaul, JM Coetzee, Orhan Pamuk and Doris Lessing, writers of vast audiences and outsize reputations. But the Swedish Academys announcement on Thursday that the 2009 prize had gone to the Romanian-born German novelist Herta Müller — she is the 12th ...