I am a literary giant in Japan

The mainstream works in the world literary scene today are still novels such as "Anna Karenina" and "War and Peace", which mainly describe the upper class circles.

Because the mainstream audience of pure literary novels is the middle class, office workers and students, writers prefer to write books about the circles that these people are curious about and yearn for.

If you focus your pen on the lower classes and ordinary people, it is easy to write a novel that complains without reason and glorifies suffering.

This type of novel is just like the war literature that Hide Kitagawa had written before. It is thankless and unpopular.

Therefore, Knut did not understand why Kitagawa Hide suddenly jumped from novels such as "One Hundred Years of Solitude" that wrote the family history of the upper class to novels such as "The Old Man and the Sea" that described the lives of lower-class fishermen.

Kitagawa Hide briefly explained his ideas and intentions for writing, but Knut, who was deeply influenced by Swedish "high literature", was still not optimistic about this new book.

He holds the opposite view from Dario Fo and Ma Yueran, believing that if Kitagawa Hide continues to produce novels of this type, he will probably miss out on next year's Nobel Prize in Literature.

In addition, after Dario Fo won the award this year, the world literary scene suddenly saw the emergence of a large number of dramatic literature and novels.

This is the same trend of online literature before Hide Kitagawa traveled through time.

Once a novel becomes a hit, its follow-up works are like weeds on the mountains, which cannot be burned by wildfires but will grow again in the spring breeze.

When Kitagawa Hide wrote "Hear the Wind Sing", similar romantic literary novels were also popular for a while, allowing many copycat writers to make money.

The Nobel Prize in Literature is still a weather vane of modern literature, so it is normal for a large number of people to follow Dario Fo.

From this point of view, Knut strongly suggested that Kitagawa Hide write some dramatic literature, otherwise, it would be a great disadvantage to compete with "The Old Man and the Sea" and dramatic literary novels next year.

In fact, his worries are not unreasonable.

In the original history, starting from 1997, dramatic literature novels have won the Nobel Prize in Literature for an unprecedented four consecutive years.

Dario Fo, the 1997 winner;
The 1998 winner is the Portuguese dramatist José Saramago;

The 1999 winner is the famous German allegorical novelist and drama writer Günter Grass;
The 2000 winner is Gao Xingjian, a Chinese drama master who was born in China and has French nationality.

These four are the four kings in the history of modern drama literature. No one would have thought that each of them could win a Nobel Prize in Literature.

The next dramatist to win the Nobel Prize was British playwright Harold Pinter in 2005.

But Kitagawa Hide doesn't care about this.

His biggest goal in writing books is to show his thoughts, feelings and past excellent works to readers.

Asking him to copy a book for no reason would be something he would be willing to do if he had no money, but now he has so much money that he can't spend it all, so there is no point in doing so.

Secondly, he wanted to improve his literary literacy by copying books, so the novels he chose to copy were all classic masterpieces that he was more familiar with.

Finally, you can win an award and make your literary career a grand slam.

Seeing that he could not convince Kitagawa Hide, Knut could only shake his head and sigh, thinking that this young man's literary career was too smooth.

Over the past century, countless top masters of the world's literary world have regretted their entire lives because they never won a Nobel Prize in Literature.

If you act willfully because of your youth, you may not be able to bear the consequences in the future.

But then he thought again, if he wasn't willful when he was young, he would not be a young man. Wasn't he the same when he was young?

Knut smiled and said nothing more.

The group soon arrived at the Horn Hotel next to the Stockholm Concert Hall.

Because the award ceremony will be held tomorrow, after putting their luggage away, Kitagawa Hide and his companion followed Ma Yueran and Knut to visit the Swedish Academy.

Facing this literary sanctuary that writers all over the world yearn for, Saito Rena was both curious and awed. The whole process was like a Japanese elementary school student visiting a museum at a school festival, with her mouth wide open the whole time.

Kitagawa Hide, who has experienced the era of information explosion, has long been demystified by these "pilgrimage sites". He is like an ordinary tourist, wandering around the School of Literature, listening to the explanations of Ma Yueran and others, and learning about the past of this world's first literary holy land.

“This stone tablet with the college motto has existed since the founding of the college, and the name of each lifetime judge will be engraved below this motto.”

The four of them went around in circles and returned to the gate of the Swedish Academy. However, when they saw the words "genius and appreciation" again, Knut and Ma Yueran's mood was completely different from when they first saw it.

At this moment, the genius is standing beside them, but the connoisseurs cannot raise their heads.

Kitagawa Hide had a different feeling when he read this sentence.

Since serving as a lifetime judge for the Naoki Prize, he has gradually come to understand the inner workings of these literary awards. A good award not only requires a large number of submissions, participants and popularity, but also requires countless staff to operate and work silently behind the scenes.

The reason why the Nobel Prize in Literature is able to surpass the Booker Prize and the Prix Goncourt to become the recognized first among the three major world literary awards is because the board of directors and operation team behind it are very professional.

In order to make the award more standardized and authoritative, the Nobel Prize Council specially co-founded the Swedish Academy with the governments of Sweden and Norway, making it the most authoritative literary institution in the two countries.

But this is far from enough.

The authority and popularity of the Nobel Prize comes from Nobel, the world-famous scientist.

But there are countless similar awards around the world. Why is the Nobel Prize the most recognized award in all fields of the world?

The history of the Nobel Prize's development can actually be glimpsed from the fame of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

After the Swedish Academy was established, the Nobel Prize Council spent a lot of money on various publicity activities, but unlike other awards, their money was mainly used to shape the Swedish Academy's image and to establish relationships with the literary circles of other countries.

On the one hand, they strive to enrich the external image of the Swedish Academy with words such as "once hired, never fired", "lifelong judges", and "a holy place of literary pilgrimage", so that famous universities in Sweden and Norway can endorse it;

On the one hand, in the first twenty years after the award was established, money was used to build relationships with literary circles in various countries, allowing them to carry out various publicity related to the Nobel Prize in their own countries.

Therefore, people of Kitagawa Hide's age have generally been instilled with the idea that the "Nobel Prize in Literature" is very cool since childhood.

It seems that as long as you win this award, you will be famous in the world literary world.

If you can't get it, no matter how successful your literary career is, it seems like something is missing.

For example, Mr. Lao She missed the Nobel Prize in Literature because he died too early.

Whenever he is talked about, everyone's first reaction is that it is a pity that Mr. Lao She did not win the award, and his status in the literary world is always slightly lower than those who won the award.

This model of mutual achievement is very commercial and successful.

Similarly, if we count the first dozen years of the Nobel Prize in Literature, there are only a handful of winners who can be named.

For example, the winner in 1908, Rudolf Eucken from Germany, it was ridiculous that he won the award.

First of all, Rudolf Eucken is not a literary writer and he has no literary works.

So why did he win the award?
The official reason for the award is: "His ardent pursuit of truth, his ability to penetrate ideas, his broad observations, and the enthusiasm and power he showed in defending and explaining an idealistic philosophy of life in countless works are great progress in the history of human philosophy."

That's right, this guy is a philosopher, not a writer.

Moreover, he is not very famous or recognized in the philosophical community.

He is the second winner from outside the literary circle after Theodor Mommsen.

Rudolf Eucken went to Stockholm to receive the award, and when he was interviewed by journalists, he seemed very confident about his award.

He publicly stated that he had carefully studied all the regulations regarding the Nobel Prize in Literature and he believed that his winning met all the necessary conditions.

His works will become more and more popular all over the world!
In fact, he won the prize purely because the Nobel Prize needed a person with a reputation in the German literary world to help promote the Nobel Prize in Germany.

After winning the prize, Rudolf Eucken worked hard to promote the Nobel Prize in Germany.

Kitagawa Hidetoshi can cite many such examples.

This is not only true for the Nobel Prize, but other literary awards are similar.

After all, once something is commercialized, there are more people trying to share the cake, and it is definitely impossible to keep it so pure.

The motto stone tablet at the entrance of the Swedish Academy is the consistent core concept of the Nobel Prize in Literature and is also an object that elevates its status.

Kitagawa Hide saw a lot of such things and settings when he visited the Swedish Academy, which opened his eyes.

Compared to the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Kitagawa Prize in Literature is a bit like a child's play.

There are still many things to learn and draw lessons from!

Ma Yueran and the others saw that Beichuan Xiu was staring at the motto stone tablet and thought that he was very moved after seeing it and was somewhat dissatisfied with the results of this year's selection. They could only keep their heads down and keep silent, pretending not to see it.

If they knew Beichuan Xiu's true thoughts, they would probably be in tears. (End of this chapter)