We Need to Talk About the Nobel Prize Bias

Of the prizes awarded in the hard sciences so far: Physiology or Medicine, Chemistry, and Physics, one has gone to an Egyptian and the others have been shared by people born in French Algeria and White South Africans. No scientific event by a Black person, globally and/or of African heritage, has inspired unanimity among members of the Nobel committees, enough to push a nominee past the selection process into the limelight. This is in the hopes that they have been nominated consistently by affiliated institutions, nations, colleagues, members of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences or past winners. To watch the yearly roll call of Nobel prizewinners in Physiology or Medicine, Chemistry and Physics is to be confronted by this gap, and its relative global insignificance.

The committees have through the decades maintained their rarefied selection process, part of which lends the prize its air of mystery and generates relative excitement for a few weeks each year. But concerns have long plagued the prizes and decisions to give them to, or withhold them from, certain people. After Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, some critics worried about the state of the Western canon and insisted that two of her works highlighted by the prize, Beloved and Jazz, were not in fact aesthetic accomplishments, but a win for the literary trends of the day: multiculturalism, feminism and Marxism. The naming of the American singer-songwriter, Bob Dylan, as the winner of the Literature Prize in 2016 was divisive for a different set of reasons. The win, presented as a progressive blurring of the genre boundaries, either elicited further concern about the overreach of the committee or praise for its forward-thinking. So far, it would seem that Dylan’s win has turned out to be one of those isolated Nobel events that reveal nothing about the direction the prize is headed.

Beyond the literature controversies, there is the Peace Prize with its contested origin. At least, two origin stories exist. In one story, the prize exists as a possible gesture Alfred Nobel made toward his own absolution, having benefited from the military-industrial complex with the invention of the dynamite. The other story credits the inclusion of an odd Peace Prize, alongside awards for Physiology or Medicine, Physics, Chemistry and Literature—a memorial prize in Economics came later—to Nobel’s friendship with the Austrian pacifist, Bertha Von Suttner, who led the International Peace Movement, and would go on to win the Peace Prize in 1905. The prize which came with special considerations—notably that it would be awarded not in Stockholm but in Oslo—would reward efforts made towards disarmament, peace congresses and brotherhood between nations, updated to include peace-promoting mechanisms like human rights and negotiation efforts.

Within the context of post-colonial paradoxes that play out across former colonies, however, the Peace Prize is complicated. From time to time, a peace Nobel is given to deserving members of the ‘developing’ world. This prize, one hopes, is not in lieu of a Nobel that suggests years of academic rigour. And, one hopes, the prize does not function on some level as a machine for turning transgressive voices into members of a tribute band. To think of the Peace Prize as a consolation prize that does not foreground academic rigour would be wrongheaded. It suggests that Mandela, Wangari, Tutu, Sirleaf, Nthuli, Anwar el-Sadat, Gbowee, Annan, Mukwege and Ali’s works at varying levels did not require the daily intellectual rigour of interfacing with insidious power. This year’s Peace Prize awarded to the jailed Iranian activist, Narges Mohammadi, cannot in good faith be considered an act of coddling. And the Peace Prize awarded to Maria Ressa in 2021 was anything but a clearheaded show of merit.

Still, it’s hard to read the Nobel enterprise in 2023 as anything but quaint and overreaching. A sort of reverse Hunger Games. Videos of Nobel Laureates being filmed receiving or recounting news of their win can be in themselves curious objects. They provide offbeat internet humour, as in the case of the British author, Doris Lessing, filmed outside her apartment looking busy and unimpressed when she is told that she has won. Through the conversation, she carries on with the routines of her day. Abdulrazak Gurnah was making himself a cup of tea when his phone rang. He picked it ready to fend off a random cold caller. A youngish Wole Soyinka, 52 at the time, was the first Black person to be named a Literature Laureate. In retrospect, he has said he savoured the prize money and would not decline a second win but hated sorely the near-total loss of anonymity it brought. My favourite spin-off event from this year’s Nobel Prize season has been the attention received by the small California-based publishing house, Transit Books, which publishes Jon Fosse’s works and Kintu, the first novel of Ugandan-British novelist, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi. It is run out of the Richmond home of publishers, Ashley Nelson Levy and Adam Levy.

Nobel winners, especially the Literature Laureates, have come to exist as distinct figures in pop culture. And beyond the general fanfare, the Black and/or African Literature Laureate remains crucial. A work of fiction is a good time and writing one can be an act of individuation or a bad wealth generation scheme, but the novel is also a gridwork on which historical erasures and inconsistencies might be reimagined or righted. A Nobel win gestures toward high craft and a lifetime of excellence, but also towards a world where all stories and histories can matter equally. It’s not always certain what the Peace Prizes confirm. But African and post-colonial winners of the prize have in the past done the important work of untangling a colonial legacy of conflicts, and the myriad problems of environmental degradation caused by extraction. It’s anyone’s guess why an African is yet to win a Nobel Prize in economics or why only one Black economist has been given the prize so far.

The Saint Lucian, W. Arthur Lewis, won the prize in 1979 for his work on, among other things, an industrialization push focused on domestic markets in Africa and the Caribbean. In 2019, Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer became Economics Laureates for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty. In the same vein, the near-impossible work that African feminists do in data gathering and identifying innovations that sustain micro economies, alone warrants recognition. Particularly because the committee has been willing to stretch the criteria for the Economics Prize to include non-economists in the past. Each year’s omission dates the academy.