(Image source: The Guardian)

BY CAMILLE MAESTRACCI

You might not have heard of him, and he just received one of the most important awards on Earth. Here’s the grand announcement. 

“The Nobel prize in literature for 2011 is awarded the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, because through his condensed lucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality”

Tomas Tranströmer isn’t well known. The Guardian says that’s the problem with the Nobel Prizes: there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of the winner.

“Journalists hate the Nobel because it's such an unknown quantity: there's no shortlist, so no way of knowing whether you're going to be confronted with a winner about whom you know very little.”

Still, the 80-year-old poet is Sweden’s most-translated author and he’s won numerous awards, like the prestigious Griffin poetry prize in 2007. American poet Robert Haas pays him a lifetime achievement tribute at that award ceremony. Here’s the video. 

“Choosing this year’s recipient of the award wasn’t very hard. I don’t think there is a working poet alive who reads poetry and translation who doesn’t think that Tomas Tranströmer is one of the master, perhaps the master of the art alive at this moment”

Tranströmer’s work is well known in the Arabic world. Interestingly enough, the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram says he beat out Syrian poet Adonis, who helped pave his path to success there. 

“Quite a remarkable surprise awaits poetry lovers... [with Transtromer] coming ahead of, among other nominees, the poet Adonis. The surprise is that Adonis helped to introduce Transtromer to the Arabic reader, accompanying him on his readings across the Arab World.”

But not everyone’s sitting easy with the win -- a blogger from the New York Review of Books -- says that the judges could read Swedish might have influenced the judges’ decision. And it calls into question how the Prize is judged. 

“Eighteen (or sixteen) Swedish nationals will have a certain credibility when weighing up works of Swedish literature, but what group could ever really get its mind round the infinitely varied work of scores of different traditions. And why should we ask them to do that?”

That’s not the only controversy this year’s Nobel Prize brewed up -- While waiting for the name of the winner, some media got confused by a hoax announcing Serbian novelist Sebrica Cosic was awarded the Nobel Prize. This would’ve been a disaster, writes The Economist:

“Someone went to the time and effort to fake a page which was then linked to the rest of the real Nobel website. … If Mr Cosic had indeed won, the fallout would have been positively nuclear. … [Cosic is] known as the intellectual godfather of the Serbian nationalism which played such a decisive role, not just in the destruction of Yugoslavia but in the military drive to create a greater Serbia from its ashes”