The Swedish Academy's award of the Nobel literature prize to the Chinese novelist Mo Yan violates the principles of its founder and represents a collusion with authoritarian power, says the Sweden-based Chinese writer Mo Li.
The award of the Nobel literature prize to a Chinese writer favoured by the authorities provoked disputes both on the Chinese internet and in Swedish public life, says Temtsel Hao.
Could Singaporeans of the future do a better job at making democracy a reality than America’s elected leaders have done for the past half-century? Maybe, if one of the most important literary works of premodern India is taught again at the recently created Yale-NUS in Singapore.
Ruaraidh MacThòmais (Derick Thomson) has as poet, scholar, teacher and editor made a profound contribution to Gaelic literature over six decades. The quality and range of his work deserve belated recognition in the context of the culture he has done so much to enlarge, says David Hayes.
What happens to a writer when he is no longer surrounded by his own language and reality? Emigres, exiles use a kind of cunning to adapt and continue functioning as writers, but they have to make so many adjustments that some fall silent. Oleg Yuriev examines some famous literary exiles to conside
The poet Andrei Voznesensky died on 1 June. One of the former “big 4” Soviet poets, he managed to hang on to his cult status until the 1990s as that of the outspoken Joseph Brodsky rose ever higher. The poet Elena Fanailova reviews his position in the pantheon of Soviet writers and assesses his co
Relief at being freed from the deadening Soviet tradition of grandiose literary anniversaries, and socialist realism’s didactic canonization of the Tolstoyan panoramic novel may have something to do with the comparatively muted Russian response to this year’s centenary of Lev Tolstoy’s death. But
Arthur Koestler, whose turbulent life charts the intellectual history of the 20thc in the West, has finally found a worthy biographer in Michael Scammell. A youthful communist and survivor of Franco’s prisons, Koestler developed into one of the West’s most persuasive crusaders against communism.
The literature of human fall and frailty illuminates the political fate of Britain’s prime minister.
