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Swedish Academy to announce Nobel Literature prize Oct. 2

Posted on: Tuesday, 30 September 2003, 06:00 CDT

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) -- The Swedish Academy will reveal this year's winner of the Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday, but who the winner may be is shrouded in secrecy.

The 18 lifetime members of the 217-year-old Swedish Academy make the annual selection in deep secrecy at one of their weekly meetings and do not even reveal the date of the announcement until two days beforehand.

They said Tuesday the winner would be named at 1 p.m. (1100 GMT) on Thursday.

Nominees are not revealed publicly for 50 years, leaving the literary world to only guess about who was in the running. However, many of the same critically acclaimed authors are believed to be on the short list every year.

Last year's award went to Hungarian writer Imre Kertesz, whose fiction draws on his experience as a teenager in Auschwitz.

Besides the prestige that comes with winning the award, the recipient also receives more than 10 million kronor (US$1.3 million) in prize money.

The Nobel Prizes for physiology or medicine will be announced Oct. 6, followed by the physics prize Oct. 7, and chemistry and economics Oct. 8. All will be announced in the capital, Stockholm.

The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Oct. 10 in Oslo, Norway.

Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist and inventor of dynamite who endowed the awards, gave only vague guidance about the prize, saying in his will that it should go to those who ``shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind'' and ``who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.''

The prizes always are presented Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.

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On the Net:

http://www.nobel.se

(mpm/mhh)

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