And given the global nature of the award, it’s not necessarily surprising if many of the names are unfamiliar. I’m pretty familiar with writers in English, but would have a hard time naming more than a dozen German authors and more than three or four Scandinavian authors. Scanning the list for authors who wrote exclusively in English the only unfamiliar names were Wole Soyinka and Abdulrazak Gurnah which is as much an indictment of my unfamiliarity with African writers as anything else.
And given the global nature of the award, it’s not necessarily surprising if many of the names are unfamiliar. I’m pretty familiar with writers in English, but would have a hard time naming more than a dozen German authors and more than three or four Scandinavian authors. Scanning the list for authors who wrote exclusively in English the only unfamiliar names were Wole Soyinka and Abdulrazak Gurnah which is as much an indictment of my unfamiliarity with African writers as anything else.