Many are called but few are chosen

World's biggest literary prizes land only in the lap of the fortunate

Many of the African writers whose works have been translated into Chinese have been nominated for and in some cases have gone on to win top literary awards.

J.M. Coetzee, a South African-born naturalized Australian, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. The Chinese translation of his Disgrace (1999) was published by Zhejiang Art and Literature Press in 2010. His Diary of a Bad Year (2007) was published in Chinese in 2006.

South African Nadine Gordimer, who died in July, was the first African woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1991. Her Beethoven was One-Sixteenth Black and Get a Life were translated into Chinese by Nanjing University Press in 2008 .

Bookmakers had widely predicted Ngugi wa Thiong'o of Kenya to win the Nobel Prize last year, but the eventual winner was Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru. Both writers had been nominated for the 2009 Man Booker International Prize. After the announcement of the Nobel Prize last year, Zoe Norridge in the British newspaper The Guardian, said Ngugi had deserved to win.

"(The Nigerian Wole) Soyinka was the first black writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1986," Norridge said. "Achebe has notoriously never been granted the Nobel and Ngugi may join him on the list of those that got away. The reasons for inviting the Kenyan author to accompany at least one of his Nigerian colleagues into the Nobel hall of fame are compelling."

Norridge said "there is only one Ngugi, and other African writers with such political and commercial traction are few and far between.

"But if the Nobel committee had chosen to honour him this year it would have renewed the African literary community's belief in the possibility, and indeed necessity, of change."

(China Daily Africa Weekly 08/29/2014 page16)