“It is deeply satisfying to win a prize in front of a lot of people”*…
I first learned about the Sartre Prize from “NB,” the reliably enjoyable last page of London’s Times Literary Supplement, signed by J.C. The fame of the award, named for the writer who refused the Nobel in 1964, is or anyhow should be growing fast. As J.C. wrote in the November 23, 2012, issue, “So great is the status of the Jean-Paul Sartre Prize for Prize Refusal that writers all over Europe and America are turning down awards in the hope of being nominated for a Sartre.” He adds with modest pride, “The Sartre Prize itself has never been refused.”
Newly shortlisted for the Sartre Prize is Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who turned down a fifty-thousand-euro poetry award offered by the Hungarian division of PEN. The award is funded in part by the repressive Hungarian government. Ferlinghetti politely suggested that they use the prize money to set up a fund for “the publication of Hungarian authors whose writings support total freedom of speech.”…
The unsurpassed Ursula Le Guin explores the rewards of refusal: “The Literary Prize for the Refusal of Literary Prizes.”
* E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web
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As we just say no, we might send lyrical birthday greetings to Christian Johann Heinrich Heine; he was born on this date in 1797. A poet, journalist, essayist, and literary critic, he is best known outside of Germany for his early lyric poetry, which was set to music in the form of Lieder (art songs) by composers such as Robert Schumann and Franz Schubert.
In his 1823 Almansor: A Tragedy he wrote, “Wherever books are burned, men in the end will also burn”… an observation that proved prescient in a personal way: his own books were burned by the Nazis during the 1930s.
