Nobel Prize for Literature

Cafe Babel has a short piece about the history of the Nobel Prize, or to be more specific, a short history of some of the controversies, such as Sartre rejecting the prize, Tolstoy being overlooked, etc.

But what caught my eye is this paragraph at the bottom:

Today, the Nobel Prize is faced with new accusations of straying from the impartiality envisioned by its founder. History shows that the Academy is partial to Europeans. No less than a quarter of the prizes awarded to date have gone to writers who work in English. Thirteen Francophone authors have been honoured, representing around 13% percent of the total. German speakers are not far behind, at 12% – thus three European languages account for half of all laureates. In comparison, China can claim only one laureate, and of the four Africans who have won the Prize, three write in English (Coetzee, Sonyenka and Gordimer). As well as being Europhile, the Academy tends to privilege male writers over females: to date there have been only ten female laureates.