Asking the Nobel Prize Winners

Jogging alongside Mario Vargas Llosa in Lima's Miraflores neighborhood. Helping Sir Vidia Naipaul's wife prepare a carrot cake in the kitchen while he yells in the next room. Having tea in Svetlana Alexievich's kitchen in Minsk. Chatting on the street with a group of homeless friends of Peter Handke in the French town of Chaville. Attending Dario Fo's three-day birthday party in Rome. Watching Annie Ernaux chat with the prostitutes on Robador Street. Or seeing Jon Fosse entering his home in the Royal Gardens of Oslo (which he occupies as an official artist of the Kingdom of Norway). Visiting the cell where his friend Nelson Mandela was imprisoned with Nadine Gordimer. Walking the streets of Tokyo with Kenzaburo Oé, hurriedly searching for a location for a peace event, only to be unexpectedly denied permission at the hotel... There are many pleasant or stimulating memories from the twenty years I spent, along with photographer Kim Manresa, chasing Nobel Prize winners in Literature around the world (we've already caught thirty). This work is now being collected in the volume Planeta Nobel, published by Libros de Vanguardia and arriving in bookstores in the coming days.

⁄ Of all the Nobel Prizes awarded, the one for Literature is the only one whose jury is made up of members of the Swedish Academy

We talked about good memories, although, because of the Nobel Prize, I was on the verge of losing my job. In December 2005, I hatched a plan with literary agent Carmen Balcells: Gabriel García Márquez, who didn't give interviews, would open the door to his house if I brought him Christmas presents from his Barcelona friends. Balcells assured me that the writer's wife, Mercedes Barcha, was in on the conspiracy, and, euphoric and laughing heartily, she hand-wrote a contract on a sheet of her famous yellow notebooks: on the one hand, she would get the interview, and on the other, my diary would pay for the week-long trip to Mexico City. "Why a week, Carmen?" "Because we don't know if he'll give it to you, you have to have time." We went to what was then known as Mexico City without an appointment or address; we just had to wait for a call at our hotel. After an excruciating wait of more than a day—locked in our room in case someone knocked—a female voice gave us an address to go to “as soon as possible.” It was Gabo's house. But upon entering, we had to wait more than an hour in the living room because Barcha still hadn't completely convinced her husband to let us in. When she let us in, we asked her, “How did you manage it?” “I told you they'd be fired from the newspaper if they returned empty-handed to Barcelona after spending a week here.” It was a plausible argument.

⁄ Alexievich's interpreter, Katsiaryna Andreeva, was arrested in 2020 and remains in jail.

A well-founded intuition led me, in 2010, to travel to New York, where Mario Vargas Llosa lived, high atop a skyscraper in Central Park, while teaching at the Princeton campus. Just the day before the Nobel Prize was announced, I attended one of his classes—on Borges—and, as I said goodbye to him that evening outside the Lincoln Theatre, I asked him about the next day's prize. "That train has already left for me," he replied, as convinced as he was mistaken.

⁄ García Márquez agreed to meet with the author of the book on the grounds that he could be fired from his newspaper

There have been some very moving moments. When, at his home in Stockholm, the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, deprived of the ability to speak since 1990 due to a hemiplegia that only allowed him to move his left hand, played Frederic Mompou's Prelude No. 6 (for the left hand) on the piano for us... Or the visit to Kenzaburo Oé in Tokyo, at his home in the Setagaya neighborhood; as soon as we left our shoes at the entrance, someone shouted to us, in Spanish: "How are you, friends?!" It was Hikari, Oé's son, the character called Eeyore in the novels. "He learned a few phrases on a late-night language program on Japanese television," the writer explained to us, who, the year his son was born, 1963, after returning from Hiroshima, made him the focus of his work.

⁄ Tranströmer, hemiplegic and speechless, played the piano with his left hand, and Soyinka assigned them bodyguards

Wole Soyinka wanted us to travel with him to Nigeria, at a time when authorities advised against travel to the African country and Lagos was considered the most dangerous city in the world. "Don't worry, I'll guarantee your safety, just send me your photo," he told us in an email. As soon as we landed, two armed bodyguards, a man and a woman perfectly suited, were waiting for us on the runway to act as our shadows. On the contrary, Orhan Pamuk threw his team off the scent by taking advantage of lunchtime so we could stroll with him around Istanbul.

⁄ Jogging alongside Vargas Llosa, having tea in Alexievich's kitchen, or meeting Handke's homeless friends

The distant JM Coetzee agreed to be accompanied on a trip to Chile, but only answered questions in writing. Patrick Modiano and I visited several Parisian cafés and met his family, but the first contact was also a long written interview, four pages he handwrote and which I treasure in my Nobel treasure chest.

⁄ The awards to Pamuk, Jelinek, Dylan and Handke caused disagreements among the jury and even some resignations

Of the thirty interviewees, Berlin and Paris are the most frequently cited cities, with the highest number of winners. As for the language in which the conversation took place (which does not necessarily coincide with the author's writing language), English is the most popular (11), followed by French (5), German (2), Polish (2), Spanish (2), and also Arabic (1), Korean (1), Japanese (1), Russian (1), Swedish (1), Hungarian (1), Portuguese (1), and Italian (1).

Among the thorns stuck in my side over the years, the most striking thing is the pain caused by thinking about Katsiaryna Andreeva, who acted as our Russian interpreter for our meeting with Svetlana Alexievich in her Minsk kitchen in 2015. This Belarusian journalist ended up getting along so well with Alexievich that the Nobel Prize winner interviewed her in several sessions for the book she was writing about love, based, like all of her books, on dozens or hundreds of testimonies. Andreeva was imprisoned in 2020 for reporting on the protests against the dictator Lukashenko. Today she remains behind bars. Three years ago, on a visit to Barcelona, ​​Alexievich—exiled in Berlin—kept remembering her and fearing that “nothing will remain of that book of mine; the authorities will have destroyed the draft and the notes, which I left at home when I left in a hurry.”

Beyond the meetings with the winners, conversations with the academics who make up the jury, the experts who advise them, the Swedish journalists who follow the Academy, and the consultations of the declassified minutes—kept secret for fifty years—shed light on the functioning of the world's most important literary prize, created by Alfred Nobel (1833-1896) in his will. Of all the Nobel Prizes awarded, the Literature Prize is the only one whose jury is composed of members of the Swedish Academy themselves, renowned experts in language and literature.

Women are underrepresented in the winners' standings. The big change came in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s, when the number rose to three per decade. This figure is still small, but in the 2020s, it has already been matched by Louise Glück (2020), Annie Ernaux (2022), and Han Kang (2024).

The Nobel Prize stirs passions, including among the juries, who have suffered deep divisions for not awarding, for example, Salman Rushdie at the time of the fatwa, or for having honored Orhan Pamuk, Elfriede Jelinek, Bob Dylan, or Peter Handke. Some of these disagreements even resulted in resignations. In 1974, the awarding of the prize to two members of the Academy itself sparked widespread criticism. But none was as controversial as that caused by the photographer and cultural manager Jean-Claude Arnault, husband of a juror and convicted of rape and sexual abuse. The Swedish #MeToo scandal implicated the Academy and forced the suspension of the prize in 2018. The King of Sweden himself—to whom the institution depends—had to intervene, and measures were taken such as including (during those turbulent two years) outsiders on the Nobel Committee.

We've all seen those lists of great writers who never won the prize. While some notable absences are true, the argument can be turned around: it's impossible to talk about the world's greatest writers without referring to the laureates of the Swedish Academy. Next Thursday, October 9, when the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Mats Malm, opens the door to his office to a swarm of journalists at 1 p.m., a new name will be added to the list of winners. The bets are already on, but uncertainty is always there. Long live the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The man who still rings the intercom at your house

Patrick Modiano, in one of the interviews compiled by Xavi Ayén in the book Planeta Nobel (Libros de Vanguardia, 2025), says that there is no such thing as a happy writer, an author fully satisfied with the work they have just completed. And it is this unhappiness that motivates you, once you consider a novel finished, to immediately begin writing another. Reading Planeta Nobel offers us the most accurate composite portrait of the contemporary Nobel Prize winner. In this typological fieldwork, one of the recurring traits is Modiano's approach to dissatisfaction as a creative driving force. Most of the winners align themselves with him. Even winning the grand prize doesn't allow them to make peace with their own creative selves. But the author of the book is not alien to this purpose, far from it. From reading Planeta Nobel, one can deduce the same anxiety of Xavi Ayén to arrange the perfect interview and, when that is not possible, to extract—with exquisite elegance—that statement that the interviewee is most determined to preserve. A few months ago, the same Ayén who was putting the finishing touches to the book he is now publishing lay in ambush on a street adjacent to the Liceu in an attempt to assault his most elusive figure, that Bob Dylan who, during concerts, demands that a corridor of black curtains be built so he can move from his camper van to the stage without having to cross paths with any human being who is not a musician in his band. He was unsuccessful because the mission was more than impossible—Dylan now only allows himself to be interviewed by Martin Scorsese—but, had he not tried, something would have broken in the determination of this Captain Ahab of the last living Nobel Prize winner. Dylan will escape him, as Harold Pinter did, despite the fact that the journalist from La Vanguardia ended up in the very living living room of his house. But Ayén will not stop pursuing the new laureates or retracing their steps to extract from some of the older ones the answers he couldn't get in his previous interviews. If necessary, he will continue to bypass the network of communications directors, literary agents, and editors that protects these writers, as he did when, without an appointment and accompanied by photojournalist Kim Manresa, he called the intercom at the London home of Nobel laureate Doris Lessing and she kindly opened the door. But the secret of the author of Planet Nobel , beyond his determination and his power of seduction—the discreet charm of the shy—is to be sought in his extensive literary background, in his passion for books, and, above all, in his ability to delve deeply into the texts to be able to formulate questions that help the interviewed author discover new planes, new dimensions of his own work. It is then that, feeling unmasked, they open up and tell him what they had not intended to tell.

Xavi Ayén, Planeta Nobel , Vanguard Books. 320 pages. 22 euros.