SOURCE: Riggan, William. “The Swedish Academy and the Nobel Prize in Literature: History and Procedure.” World Literature Today 55, no. 3 (summer 1981): 399-405.

In the following essay, Riggan presents an overview of the background and method of the committee for awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In presenting separate essays on the ten literary members among “The Eighteen” of the Swedish Academy, the Spring 1981 issue of WLT [World Literature Today, hereafter WLT] (55:2, pp. 197-256) was an attempt to introduce “The Swedish Writers Behind the Nobel Prize” as the ten prominent, engaging and highly individualistic authors that they are, in contrast to the occasional public image of them abroad as a monolithic group of aged men given to “musing the obscure”¹ in their annual Nobel selections. The criticism which these yearly choices call forth—whether of a literary, a journalistic or an ideological nature—often betrays a comparable misapprehension of the...