IBPC: Poetry and Poets in Rags

10/26/2004

Under massive American pressure and backed by infusions of U.S. cash, the central government has been forced to attempt a daunting task: taming the violent underside of Yemen's storied tribal culture, which exists in relative autonomy from the rulers in San'a, the capital.

[Amin] Mashrigi's poetry tours are part of the campaign. Funded by the government, the 32-year-old bard travels tirelessly through Yemen's rough countryside, using tribal logic and honor codes to dissuade the locals from kidnapping foreigners, toting heavy weaponry or sheltering fugitives.

from The Seattle Times: Yemeni poet fights terrorism with words

The simple perfection of the sphere of repose unveils itself to him [Jibananda Das] at night. Behind the eternity of sleep, is the eternity of rebirth. The poet remembers distant times when he has walked thus the night in long-forgotten cities, experiencing the deja-vu of continuous recurrence. The powerful transient circulation of the city by day is thus counterbalanced in his consciousness by the equally powerful eternal repose which he lives recurrently. And yet a complex combination of wearniess and mystery surrounds the entire phenomenon

In Babylon alone thus I have walked the night
For some reason. What, today after a thousand thousand tired years I am yet to understand.

from The Independent: Jibananda Das: The best Bengali poet

In the archives of NRK he has left behind a series of programs, ranging from pure entertainment, travellogs and documentaries to moving interviews with the less fortunate. All were programs that gathered the nation in front of the radio or the tv set.

Erik Bye also left behind a treasure of poems and ballads, several of them forever a part of Norway's cultural heritage.

from The Norway Post: Norway's media giant and poet Erik Bye has died

The Futurists saw art as a weapon in a bitter struggle with the old. It took its imagery and inspiration from the city, the technologies of a growing capitalism that were changing the world.

[Vladimir] Mayakovsky was committed to transforming not only the subject of poetry but its form and language as well.

In November 1914 Mayakovsky was expelled from art school for his Futurist readings and anti-war stance. He then went all out as a propagandist, becoming the leading poet of the avant-garde.

from Socialist Worker: The poet of the revolution

Second Space is Czeslaw Milosz's final collection of poems. Milosz, winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for literature, died Aug. 14 at age 93. Not surprisingly, much of this book concerns final things, as the title poem - the very first one - makes clear:

Have we really lost faith in that other space?
Have they vanished forever, both Heaven and Hell?
Without unearthly meadows how to meet salvation?
And where will the damned find suitable quarters?

from Philadelphia Inquirer: Editor's Choice: Last poems, end-of-life thoughts from Milosz

This schism between Airman/Enemy is transferred to the poem itself, where the plot seems to shift between wartime and love story. The Enemy is hunted for love as much as he hunted as per military orders. Of course, this is [W. H.] Auden, so naturally there exists in this war/love story an element of homosexuality, albeit coded and disguised through wartime rhetoric. "There is something particularly horrible," the Airman writes, "about the idea of women pilots."

from Maisonneuve Magazine: War and Peace: What We Can Learn from Auden's Airman

The poem was published in a literary journal in 2001. That's when [Sergio] Witz [Rodriguez], a father of three young girls, was arrested, fingerprinted, hauled before a judge and introduced to Chapter 5, Article 191 of the federal penal code, which calls for up to four years in prison for "insulting national symbols."

from South Florida Sun-Sentinel: Poet pens 21 lines, puts free speech to test

I saw at once why [Thomas] Hardy reacted as he did. This is the edge of the world, a place of extremes of high and low, rock and sea. The expanse of the sky is huge, the clouds so luminous they seem to give off their own dramatic light, blown in great processions before the wind. Gannets go down into the sea like bombs. Emma [Gifford]’s view of the landscape was that “no summer visitors can have a true idea of its power to awaken heart and soul”. She was right, I thought as I walked along the clifftops.

from The Sunday Times: Love literary - the quiet corner of Cornwall where Thomas Hardy met his heroine

Ted Kooser: During the period when I was in surgery and going through radiation, I really didn't do any writing. But as I came up out of radiation and was trying to get myself back in some sort of physical shape, I would walk a couple of miles every morning and then find something along that route to write about.

And then I'd come home and I wrote, I wrote 130 little, short poems over the course of a winter. It was very important for me to see something from each day that I could do something with and find some order in, because I was surrounded by medical chaos or health chaos of some kind.

from PBS: Online NewsHour: A conversation with America's newest poet laureate, Ted Kooser.

Don't be alarmed if a stranger stops you in the street today to recite a rhyming stanza for your listening pleasure. It could very well be an imaginative homeless person looking for spare change. More likely, it will be one of 27 Canadian poets who are taking part in Random Acts of Poetry Week, the first cross-country public celebration of poetry.

from The Globe and Mail: Canada's week to wax poetic

"I just wanted to leave my 'estate' (which is what it really is) to someone directly connected with the last drop of my direct blood line … and not to leave a dingblasted (two expletives) thing to my wife's one hundred Greek relatives," Kerouac wrote.
.
When Gabrielle Kerouac died in 1973, her will left everything to Stella Sampas Kerouac. And when Sampas Kerouac died in 1990, she left everything to her family. Her brother, John Sampas, became the estate's executor.

from International Herald Tribune: Media: Claws still out for Kerouac estate

Special Section: Anthony Hecht

The camp was Flossenburg, which was attached to Buchenwald - it was where the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer died. When Hecht reached it, 500 prisoners were dying of typhus every day.

Even his frankest examinations of human cruelty are marked by a calm tone and formal inventiveness. He could beguile the reader into taking a conversational piece in the manner of Frank O'Hara but then embark upon an account of torture and murder.

from The Telegraph: Anthony Hecht

Hecht’s final book, The Darkness and the Light, was notable for its further condensation of what was already a compressed poetic form. One poem, Sarabande on Attaining the Age of Seventy-Seven, has as its final stanza:

A turn, a glide, a quarter-turn and bow,
The stately dance advances; these are airs
Bone-deep and numbing as I should know by now,
Diminishing the cast, like musical chairs.

from The Times: Anthony Hecht

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anthony Hecht died Wednesday of lymphoma at his house in Washington, D.C. NPR's Michele Norris comments on his poetry . . . .

from National Public Radio: Pulitzer-Winning Poet Anthony Hecht Dies

Mr. Hecht was known for his dark, serious themes, but he also was capable of lyrical evocations of love, particularly in such poems as "Peripeteia," in which he compares his wife to Miranda, a character in Shakespeare's "The Tempest":

Miraculous Miranda, steps from the stage . . .
And leads me out of the theater, into a night
As luminous as noon, more deeply real,
Simply because of her hand, than any dream
Shakespeare or I or anyone ever dreamed.

from The Washington Post: Poet, Essayist Anthony Hecht Dies at 81

10/19/2004

Edinburgh was last night named as the world's first City of Literature in a decision which could have a multi-million-pound spin-off for Scotland.

Only hours after Unesco, the cultural arm of the United Nations, received the capital's proposal at a meeting of its executive committee, the leaders of the Edinburgh bid were privately informed of their success.

from The Herald: Edinburgh named first City of Literature

We cannot approach this poetry as if we were on our way, all dressed up and bedecked with jewels, to a Wagner concert at Tel Aviv's Mann Auditorium to enjoy music that has been emptied of its ideology, because the music, or, to be more precise, the poetry "is not just a tool but is rather the basic structure of [Uri Zvi] Greenberg's political statement."

[Hannan] Hever's insight, which removes the esthetic veil from the face of many readers of Greenberg's poetry, naturally brings into sharper focus the issue of that poetry's unique status in the corpus of Hebrew literature.

from Haaretz: Saying 'I' in someone else's voice

"I feel that I'm the only person in the world who doesn't know the feeling of calm irreverence--the only madman in the world therefore--the only broken fish. All the others are perfectly contented with pure life. I am not. . . . Meanwhile I'm continually astonished that people really don't love each other. How can they do it? (So now I'm psychotic finally.) . . . Clearly I'd better hurry up and die. There's no place for me in such a world. Nobody loves, nobody loves." In many similar passages, we see [Jack] Kerouac working through layer after layer of incredible psychic pain.

from San Francisco Chronicle: Real Kerouac: The Beat writer's journals reveal a man apart from his persona

"My teacher and mentor Karl Shapiro once said poetry of the 20th century was the first poetry that ever had to be taught. Literary interpreters tend to establish the fortunes of writers, and if they can't find something in a poem that depends on their talents of interpretation, that poem is brushed aside. Poetry has gradually drifted toward being more and more in need of interpretation, perhaps because of this." [Ted Kooser]

from Philadelphia Inquirer: Poet laureate an oracle of the ordinary

[E.E. Cummings'] father, a sociology instructor at Harvard who went on to become a prominent Unitarian minister in Cambridge, was a formidable presence whose "controlling behavior" made his only son uncomfortable but who inspired, at his death, what may be his son's greatest poem. It begins:

my father moved through dooms of love
through sames of am through haves of give,
singing each morning out of each night
my father moved through depths of height

from The Washington Post: 'E.E. Cummings: A Biography'

"her bright green leather high-heeled pumps
draws back the curtains to the sun & coffee in bed
on trays with legs this windscreen of a morning
moving with beech & yew a stewpond full of goldfish" [--John James]

The energy of this opening comes from the subtle shifts in register and grammar, the way the lines ("the bands of colour") don't quite fit together. The "high-heeled pumps" of line one are clearly not the subject of the verb "draws" of line two.

from Guardian Unlimited: Keep looking up!

It is a startling thought that no previous English poet has ever had a biography on this scale. Bevis Hillier’s three volumes, drawing on a staggering array of first-hand reminiscences, interviews, letters and journals, is fuller than any account we have, or ever can have, of Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth and the other historical greats. Is Betjeman worth it?

from The Sunday Times: Biography: Betjeman by Bevis Hillier

[Stephen Greenblatt] turns to the 1609 first edition of the sonnets, and running a fingertip across the lines, reads: "To the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets. Mr. W.H. All happinesse and that eternitie promised by our ever-living poet. Wisheth the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth. T.T."

This yellowed sheet of paper, Greenblatt says, "is the most enigmatic page in all of Shakespeare scholarship." It raises so many questions. Who was the begetter? Who was Mr. W.H.? William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke? Or was it really H.W., Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton? And -- the most basic query of all -- who was Shakespeare?

from The Washington Post: Stephen Greenblatt, Rockford-Upon-Avon

"People in the Muslim community have realized [Mevlana Jalaluddin] Rumi can provide a positive model for interfaith dialogue," said Marcia Hermansen, professor of Islamic Studies at Loyola University, Chicago.

[Zeki] Saritoprak, who helped found the Rumi Forum in Washington in 1998 while he was a researcher at Georgetown, said those who would politicize Islam and invoke the faith to justify acts of violence against innocents "have nothing to do with the teachings of Islam."

Rumi offers a powerful vision to counteract such false teachings, many Islamic scholars say.

from The Plain Dealer: The healing balm of a poet's words

"The best thing would have been to move those collections to nearby mosques," he [Saad Eskander] says, "but there was a reason for choosing that ministry: It was a fortress of support of the Baathist regime and housed officials" from Mr. [Saddam] Hussein's intelligence forces.

Eskander says the move meant the books and archives in that basement survived the burning and looting. But about two months after Baghdad's fall, he says, "someone entered the basement, took what they wanted, and opened the water taps."

The objective, some speculate, was to obliterate the Republican Guards' archives, which were among the documents.

from The Christian Science Monitor: Iraq's looted heritage makes a steady--if slow--comeback

Two years later, however, scientists had another look and discovered that [Johann Wolfgang von] Goethe's body was starting to decay - leading them to take the drastic step in 1970 of removing Goethe's remaining flesh from his bones, in a clandestine night-time operation.

Newly released black and white photos of Goethe's skeleton revealed that he was suffering from Morbus Forestier, a severe pathological deformation, where several vertebrae fuse, Dr [Herbert] Ullrich said.

from Guardian Unlimited: 'Upright' Goethe had back pain

10/12/2004

The UK's most valuable annual poetry prizes are in their 13th year and going strong. Founded by William Sieghart, chairman of the Forward Arts Foundation, they are designed to raise the profile of contemporary poetry and reward both established and up-and-coming poets, with prizes for the best collection, best first collection and best single poem.

from Guardian Unlimited: Forward Prizes for Poetry 2004

For [Jacques] Derrida, the notion of 'reading' is one that implies a comprehensive, complete commentary on a poem or novel in its entirety, an achievement which, he said, is impossible. One can never finally read a text in its entirety, but one must always carefully read and re-read, because the act of reading is always marked by an ever-receding horizon; it is always, to use Derrida's own words, 'to come'; it is always a future which will never arrive as a present.

from The Times: Jacques Derrida

Then one day he remembered the famous 'promise of Baba Kuhi.' Baba Kuhi was a Perfect Master-Poet who had died in Shiraz in 1050 A.D., and had been buried about four miles from Shiraz, at a place called 'Pir-i-sabz,' meaning 'the green old man,' on a hill named after Baba Kuhi. The promise that Baba Kuhi had given before he died was that if anyone could stay awake for forty consecutive nights at his tomb he would be granted the gift of poetry, immortality, and his heart's desire. Hafiz, interested in the third of these three, vowed to keep this vigil that no one had yet been able to keep.

from Persian Journal: In Memory of Hafiz

Did Shakespeare witness the royal entertainments at Kenilworth in 1575, and did they inspire A Midsummer Night's Dream ? Was his father an alcoholic, and was that wasted, lovable father the inspiration for Falstaff? Did Shakespeare leave Stratford because he was caught poaching? What matters, [Stephen] Greenblatt answers, is "not the degree of evidence but rather the imaginative life that the incident has". What matters is not the true story, but a good story.

from Guardian Unlimited: Stephen, Will and Gary too

Using the image of a garden to describe the Arab and Western literary canons, [Amr] Moussa said cultural history showed the common roots shared by East and West.

"The inflammatory waves of hate, which again are doing their utmost to engulf us, were dampened down time and again through the influence of this garden," he said.

But Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, 92, asked in a speech read aloud for him at the gala ceremony whether the new attention granted to the Muslim world by the West was not based on fear of terrorism rather than true interest.

from Islam Online: Frankfurt Opens With Calls Against Stereotyping Muslims

The Arabic literary canon as it is seen in the Arabic world shows many similarities with Western views. A look in, for instance, the anthologies compiled in Western countries and the literature program of universities confirms the idea that Western countries follow Arabic trends to a great extent. There are, however, some differences.

The scholar Hamdi Sakkut states in a work published in 2000 discussing the Arabic novel:

We have also restricted our study to the most widespread literary trends and currents. Therefore, the less prevalent trends such as science fiction, feminist literature . . . are beyond the scope of this introduction.

from Islam Online: The "Canon" of Modern Arabic Literature?

The Nobel Prize rewards writers with the more than decent sum of 10 million Swedish kronor (S$2.3 million).

But beyond filthy lucre, the Nobel holds the promise of a pearl beyond price for lesser-known writers - acceptance into canon.

from The Straits Times: Literary awards can only do so much

[Ted Kooser] believes that poetry could be useful in these chaotic times, that it could bring a quiet order to the minds of its readers.

It's even something that he wishes more people would take up.

"What could possibly be wrong with a world in which everybody was trying to write poems?" Kooser said. "Is that not better than watching 'Survivor' or engaging in some sort of nefarious, stupid activity?"

from Omaha World-Herald: Poet laureate aims for understanding

Darn it.

Who can compete with these Pulitzer Prize winners, who make words sing and dance and float off into lofty ... something.

"Every true poem is a spark and aspires to the condition of the original fire arising out of the emptiness," Charles Wright penned.

from The Grand Rapids Press: When these Pulitzer Prize-winners get together, it's pure poetry

[C.D. Wright]: It's getting harder.

AT [Arkansas Times]: Really? Could you elaborate on that a bit?

CDW: It gets harder partly because the more you know the more challenged you are. The more you know about a particular art practice, the more challenged you are to do a good job at it. So maybe it has to do with a loss of innocence, which maybe should be phrased "a loss of ignorance." Also, your life gets increasingly complicated as you get older. There are a lot of different things pulling on the same kind of attention. The demands you have on yourself increase in terms of what you want the yield to be from a given work. Maybe you become your own worst critic.

from Arkansas Times: The Wright stuff

[Joan Houlihan] thinks the degree and academic affiliation aren't requirements for writing good poetry and there ought to be a community and venue for serious poets without these credentials. ''Franz [Wright] is not an MFA," she said. ''Nor was Emily Dickinson."

In March, she organized a meeting of about 50 people to discuss creation of a center for people who want to read, write, discuss, and learn about poetry.

from The Boston Globe: Moving poetry into the community

Special Section: Elfriede Jelinek: Novel Novelist & Now Nobelist

Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek, a self-described advocate for "the weak" whose forceful defenses of social and political freedom have frequently clashed with conservatives in her native country, has won the Nobel Prize in literature.

In announcing the award in Stockholm on Thursday, the Swedish Academy praised her "musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays" that "reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power."

from The State: Austrian Novelist Jelinek Wins Nobel Prize

NPR's Alex Chadwick talks to NPR's Lynn Neary about the winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, Australian Elfriede Jelinek.

from National Public Radio: Controversial Austrian Writer Wins Nobel Lit Prize

The novel tells of a middle-aged woman who was trained at the Vienna Conservatory for music, like Jelinek, who seeks release through voyeurism, sado-masochism and self-mutilation with a razor.

from The Scotsman: 'Porn' author wins Nobel

"It's accurate to say she is not cheerful," Peter Ayrton, the English publisher for Elfriede Jelinek, said yesterday. "But reading her is a totally exhilarating experience."

He was rejoicing at the Frankfurt book fair as word spread that the severe, feminist and dissident Austrian writer had unexpectedly won the $1.3m (£750,000) Nobel prize for literature.

from Guardian Unlimited: Austrian writer wary at scooping Nobel prize

[Margarete] Lamb-Faffelberger calls Jelinek's writing "creative resistance."

"She digs down to the bottom and looks at those who are suffering greatly under the anti-Semitism that is still smoldering under the rug, the xenophobia that is still smoldering under the rug, the Catholicism with all its negatives," said Lamb-Faffelberger.

Jelinek, for instance, dedicated her 1997 play "Stecken, Stab und Stangl" to a group of Gypsies killed in a hate crime.

from The Washington Post: 'Piano Teacher' Author Wins Literature Nobel

10/5/2004

with a special section: Nobel Prize Preview

All poetry was suspect, even Bengali poetry, of which I didn't read much in those days. But I do remember looking beadily at Buddhadev Bose's poem 'Frogs': what was that slimy thing hopping out of its lines, beauty? Aargh! And so this poem by Arun Kolatkar, something about its attitude, with its hints of a way out of this stinking heap of leaden skies and psychotic evenings, with its hard voice and tat-a-tat rhythms (hey, get laid, get paid, I'm just a working stiff, I need a drink, screw everything else...) was immensely appealing.

from The Daily Star: Arun Kolatkar (1932-2004): of coups, Quest and the letter

[Alexander Pope] was also a Roman Catholic and, in the circumstances of the day, considered a subversive. He was, for example, denied access to the great universities.

So his real academy became the London coffee houses among the wits and hacks. The Rape of the Lock is addressed to just such an audience of the cultural and the articulate literati who haunted Will's or Button's.

from Guardian Unlimited: Hair apparent

[Michael Donaghy] would later suggest that he learnt little about poetry formally: "I owe everything that I know about poetry really to the public library system and not to my miseducation at [Fordham] university . . . My parents would say something like 'go out and play in the burning wreckage until dinnertime', and I'd make a beeline for the library." This voluntary exposure to rows of books helps explain the huge gamut of material on which he would later draw.

from Telegraph: Michael Donaghy

"She has a candour and assurance about her that I think is purely American," says the poet and novelist Helen Dunmore. "There's a clarity about the way she talks, even the way she looks, that is quintessentially New England." Poet laureate Andrew Motion, a friend and admirer of [Anne] Stevenson since the early 1970s, places her in "the lineage of puritan women poets that extends from Emily Dickinson to Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath"; while the American poet, novelist and critic Jay Parini thinks of her "as a contemporary Emily Dickinson, a poet who works on a small canvas, quietly, with big themes".

from Guardian Unlimited: Border crossings

Rejection slips from the magazine [kayak] featured a person lost in an icy crevasse, and sometimes lengthy advice written on the back.

"It was a well known and respected magazine," said Michael Basinski, curator of the poetry archive at the State University of New York at Buffalo, which holds all 64 issues [George] Hitchcock produced from 1964 to 1984.

"It nicely builds a bridge between the fugitive publication and the overstuffed academic publication," Basinski said. "It had this fierce independence. The great function of these magazines and the great import of Hitchcock as editor would be to gather this community of writers around his literary vision, which was quasi-surreal."

from Ottawa Citizen: George Hitchcock edited kayak, the leading poetry magazine of its time

Interpreting the formal constraints of [Inger] Christensen's poem was [Roger] Sinha's first challenge. The Danish poet used the alphabet (as the title [Alphabet] implies) in addition to Fibonacci's number system as a basis for the structure of the poem. Taking up this structure, Sinha substitutes body parts that begin with each letter of the alphabet and puts them in motion for the amount of time it takes to read the corresponding lines of the poem, creating an "anatomy of the alphabet" that moves through time.

from Maisonneuve Magazine: The Poetry of Dance: Roger Sinha's "Apricot Trees Exist"

Now in an astonishingly literal fashion he [Raymond Danowski] has donated a library he himself created - some 60,000 volumes and tens of thousands more of periodicals, posters, recordings and other items devoted to 20th-century poetry in the English language - to the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University here.

The Danowski collection includes rare and coveted volumes by T. S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Allen Ginsberg, William Carlos Williams and James Merrill, among many others. There is even a first printing of an 1855 edition of Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," Mr. Danowski said, because of Whitman's influence on later poets.

from The New York Times: A Windfall of Modern Poetry for Scholars

"What Men Want"--the title is a gender flip on a famous question of Freud's--has an easy conversational style. The speaker tells a dinner party anecdote, and in recording the byplay of interpretations and interruptions, the poet demonstrates the difficulty of delivering a feeling past the battle lines of gender. Behind it all, and very appropriate for this time in the Jewish calendar, is the possibility of renewal, which is also difficult, yet something for which we all wish.

from Forward: Psalm 151: What Men Want

What I look for in a poem is surprise and strangeness. I want to see the untranslatable translated into language and form. I want to be delighted. I want the poem to reveal the complexities of suffering and joy, to record, to remain unforgiving, to forgive. I want a poem that witnesses and sings.

With that in mind, you can see how resistant Yeats' poem is to being political. But what can be more political, more biased and subjective than yearning for love to save the world?

from The Oregonian: Political poetry needs to sing -- not preach

John [Grey] says the initial inspiration for "Don't Feed the Water Fowl" was a sign in Johnston Memorial Park, where he and his wife Gale sometimes walk. The first thing that occurred to him when he saw it was that the authorities "don't want nature spoiling such a natural spot." He tried to imagine the motivation behind such a sign, then "sauced it lightly with a little universal truth."

from The Providence Journal: Poetry column: Tom Chandler: Prolific poet pokes fun at our world

Hiring a room to hear and abuse [William] McGonagall became fashionable among the bourgeoisie.

You don't have to look too hard to find elements of class warfare in their response. What better way for these people to feel sure of their place in the world than to laugh at the working-class madman who dared to presume to be a poet? Perhaps that's why Billy Connolly, another self-made, working-class man sympathises with him so much.

"To McGonagall . . . the world was a circus of cruel people, whose only pleasure seemed to be to abuse others worse off than themselves," he once perceptively wrote.

from The Sunday Times: Ecosse: Rubbish ? by Royal appointment

Special Section: Nobel Prize Preview: Bids and Odds

The Swedish Academy is so eccentric in its choice that frequently the astonished winner enjoys 15 minutes of fame and is quietly forgotten.

No less bizarrely, the academy has overlooked some towering pillars of modern literature, like Proust and Joyce.

Then there are those well known writers who, year after year, are considered to be contenders, only to be disappointed.

from International Herald Tribune: Mysteries of the Nobel Lit

"In Stockholm there has been a lot of talk, and it has intensified this year, that there are so few women who have won the prize," Svante Weyler, chief editor at Norstedts, one of Sweden's biggest publishing houses, said.

The Academy has honoured only nine women since the prize was first handed out in 1901. Most recently, it went to Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska in 1996.

from iafrica.com: Will a woman writer win the Nobel?

Since its inception in 1901, the Society has chosen winners from a wide spectrum of literary sources, including poetry, novels, short stories, plays, essays and speeches.

Favourite to be named Laureate this year is Syrian born poet Adonis, available at a best price of 6/4.

from readaBet.com: Nobel Prize for Literature Betting Odds Preview

Fredrik Lind of Hedengren's book store in Stockholm is known for predicting whose works to have in stock. His tip this year is Ali Ahmed Said, the Syrian-Lebanese poet known as Adonis.

"Arabic poetry is a tradition that has never got any prize and he is the greatest living Arabic poet," said Lind.

Adonis has become a Nobel favourite against the backdrop of bloodshed in Iraq and the Middle East. No poet has won since 1996 while novelists have won for the last seven years.

from Reuters: Nobel brings writers fame, fortune and frustration

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