It is a running joke in the anglophone literary world that noon on the day that the Nobel prize for literature is announced is an annual moment of collective shame. News of the first Belarusian laureate in 2015 was greeted, according to one writer, by the sound of 10,000 reporters Googling Svetlana Alexievich – though, as Ms Alexievich is herself a distinguished journalist, reporters were on this occasion relatively well placed.
When the French novelist JMG Le Clézio took the medal seven years earlier, there was no such luck: his novels were nowhere to be found. His most recent translator, Alison Anderson, reported that it had taken multiple rejections on both sides of the Atlantic before his bestseller, Onitsha, was picked up by an American university press. It took a year after the win for Penguin to scramble two of his works into print in the UK as modern classics.
