In his will, Alfred Nobel had made it clear that the Literature Nobel should be awarded to “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”. That directive, conformed to the letter, has been used to justify many of the early omissions, including James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Henrik Ibsen or Anton Chekhov. That grip has loosened over the years. Nevertheless, the announcement of the Literature prize each year brings with it derisive scorn (especially by Americans, who have been overlooked since Toni Morrison in 1993 and remain quite peeved), some chest beating (the Koreans wonder why one of theirs can’t win it too, the English worry they are no longer the locus of the literary world) and a general introspection whether a group of Nordic people can really stand in judgment over vast and varied categories of writing from every corner of the earth.