When will we see the next Irish Nobel Prize in Literature laureate?

This year’s Nobel Prize has gone to the South Korean author Han Kang.
That means we are a quarter way through this century without an Irish writer getting as much as a sniff of a Nobel laureateship. A century ago, Ireland already had one award in the bag with WB Yeats’s prize in 1923 and another on the way as George Bernard Shaw was honoured in 1925. If Ireland is to match its 20th-century record, we are already off the pace. Perhaps we are fated to endure the Nobel equivalent of our Eurovision Song Contest experience – a feast of success in the 20th century and a permanent famine thereafter.
It will evidently be difficult to repeat the achievement of Yeats, Shaw, Beckett and Heaney in the coming 75 years. All four were exceptional writers and circumstances favoured them. Yeats was lauded by the Swedish Academy for expressing the spirit of a nation at a time of political transformation in Ireland. He saw his prize as part of Europe’s welcome for the Irish Free State.
Shaw built his reputation in the spotlight of the London stage while Beckett benefited from also being a literary figure in France, whose prize was collected for him by the French ambassador in Stockholm. Heaney’s standing as an Ulster poet probably gave him added appeal at a time when peace was on the horizon in Northern Ireland.
Even if we are lucky enough to produce 21st-century writers of the same high calibre, there is no guarantee of a repeat performance. The fact is that, just like at the Olympic Games, the bigger countries tend to dominate the Nobel medal table. Among the less populous countries, only Sweden and Norway can match Ireland’s Nobel record in literature, and there may be a bit of unintentional regional bias at work there.
There is now a far wider geographical spread of prize winners than in Yeats’s day. Of the 22 laureates who preceded Yeats, all bar one was European-born, the exception being India’s Rabindranath Tagore (1913), whose cause Yeats had actively championed. By contrast, since 2000 there have been winners from the US, China, South Africa, Peru, Trinidad and Tobago, Tanzania, Japan and now South Korea. Just as it is now more difficult for young Irish footballers to break into the upper echelons of the English Premier League because of competition from a global talent pool, expect the same to happen to our writers with respect to future Nobel acclaim.
There is now far greater gender balance among laureates. In the years before Yeats picked up his award, only one woman had been honoured, the Swedish novelist, Selma Lagerlöf in 1909. Indeed, in the prize’s first half-century, only eight woman were chosen. Since the year 2000, nine women have triumphed, which may be a pointer to future Irish prospects.
Ireland has had a few notable Nobel misses, James Joyce being the most obvious, who would probably have been honoured had he lived on into the less circumscribed postwar world, but also Brian Friel and, perhaps, Eavan Boland, one of a small handful of Irish poets whose work I have regularly come across in bookshops across the United States. Edna O’Brien must surely have entered the thoughts of the Swedish Academy for the undimmed vitality of her later novels.
It is striking that there is little chatter around possible Irish laureates, even though we are not without credible contenders. Michael Longley would be a deserving recipient although he lacks the international profile enjoyed by Heaney on the back of prestigious posts at Oxford and Harvard. Among current Irish novelists, if we use winning the Booker Prize as a qualifier, that would put Roddy Doyle, Anne Enright, Anna Burns, John Banville and Paul Lynch in the frame. There have been four dual Booker/Nobel winners, VS Naipaul, Kazuo Ishiguro, Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee (who also won The Irish Times International Fiction Prize 1995).
Closer to home, if the International Dublin Literary Award can be used as a yardstick, that would shine a spotlight on Colum McCann, Colm Tóibín, Kevin Barry, Mike McCormack and Anna Burns, the only dual Booker/Dublin winner. Orhan Pamuk and Herta Müller have won both the Dublin award and a Nobel Prize. The Booker and Dublin awards are for an individual novel and not for a life’s work as is the case with the Nobel Prize.
It is quite possible that Ireland’s next Nobel showing will not come for decades yet, which means that the successor to Heaney may still be waiting to be published, and may not even be born yet. Could the Swedish Academy, which has occasionally shown a flair for surprise choices – Bob Dylan comes to mind here – be tempted in coming years to depart from its habit of honouring senior literary figures and opt for a younger writing talent like Sally Rooney? Her latest novel, Intermezzo, has attracted a laudatory review the London Review of Books, which is the kind of publication that probably wields some influence in the corridors of literary power in Stockholm.
If Irish writers do not manage to achieve future Nobel recognition, will that damage Ireland’s standing as a land of literature? Not necessarily. Truth be told, many recipients during the 120 years of the Prize’s existence have faded from view. Who outside of academia or their own homelands would recognise the names of Władysław Reymont (1924), Frans Sillanpää (1939) or Pär Lagerkvist (1951)?
One feature of the Irish achievement, connected no doubt with the increased universality of the language in which they wrote, is that all four of our laureates – Yeats, Shaw, Beckett and Heaney – still shine brightly in the eyes of readers and theatre lovers. The same is true of so many contemporary Irish writers who continue to enchant readers all over the world, even if they may never scale the Olympian heights of Nobel glory.
Daniel Mulhall is the author of WB Yeats and the Ireland of his Time (New Island Books, 2023).