Permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Horace Engdahl told the Associated Press that US writers were "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture", which he said dragged down the quality of their work. "The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature," Engdahl said. "That ignorance is restraining."
"Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the centre of the literary world ... not the United States," he said, later adding that "what I said expresses a conviction resulting from more than 10 years of assiduous labour". Toni Morrison was the last American to win the prize, in 1993.
Contacted by guardian.co.uk this morning, Engdahl claimed a misunderstanding had occurred and that the Swedish Academy strictly adhered to Alfred Nobel's wish "that in awarding the prize no consideration whatsoever be given to the nationality of the candidates". He added: "It is of no importance, when we judge American candidates, how any of us views American literature as a whole in comparison with other literatures. The Nobel prize is not a contest between nations but an award to individual authors. It is essential to remember that when national feelings run high." He maintained that there was "no reason for any particular author to get upset by my observations.
Engdahl, a professor of Scandinavian literature and a literary critic, has been permanent secretary since 1997 of the secretive committee of 18 Academy members who select the winner. Over the course of a year, the Academy will whittle down nominated authors from 200 to a shortlist of five, which is not made public. An author must receive more than half of votes cast to take the prize.

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In its citation, the Swedish Academy praised Le Clézio, 68, as the "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sexual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization."
Le Clézio's work defies easy characterization, but in more than 40 essays, novels and children's books, he has written of exile and self-discovery, of cultural dislocation and globalization, of the clash between modern civilization and traditional cultures. Having lived and taught in many parts of the world, he writes as fluently about Algerian immigrants in France, native Indians in Central America and islanders in the Indian Ocean as he does about his own past.
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio was born in 1940 in Nice and raised in a small village nearby, speaking English and French. His father, a doctor, was born in Mauritius and lived in Africa for many years while young Gustave was growing up. When he was seven, Gustave travelled to Nigeria with his family and spent a year out of school, an experience he recalled later in his semi-autobiographical novel "Onitsha" (1991).
He studied English at Bristol University, graduated from the Institute d'Études Littéraires in Nice, received a master's degree at the University of Aix-en-Provence and wrote his doctoral thesis for the University of Perpignan on the early history of Mexico.
Le Clézio has taught at colleges in Mexico City, Bangkok, Boston; Austin, Texas and Albuquerque, New Mexico; among other places. He has spent several years living among the Embera Indians in Panama and has expressed his fascination with indigenous people and literature by publishing translations of Mayan sacred texts.
Le Clézio became a literary sensation with his first novel, "Le Procès-verbal" (1963), published in English as "The Interrogation." The novel follows the meandering of a sensitive young man who, having given a speech to an apathetic crowd, winds up for a time in a mental hospital.
It was in the tradition of the 1960s Nouveau Roman, and has been compared in mood to books like "The Stranger" by Albert Camus.
But his style evolved in later books, becoming more lyrical and accessible, and taking on bolder and more sweeping themes, often with an ecological underpinning.
"The latter part has a very contemporary feel," said Antoine Compagnon, a professor of French and comparative literature at Columbia University. "It has an openness to others, to other cultures, to the South, to minorities. This is a very current sensibility."
In 1980, Le Clézio published "Désert," which told the story of a young nomad woman from the Sahara and her clashes with modern European civilization. The book was considered his definitive breakthrough and it became the first winner of the new Paul-Morand prize, awarded by the Académie Française. The Swedish Academy said that the book "contains magnificent images of a lost culture in the North African desert contrasted with a depiction of Europe seen through the eyes of unwanted immigrants."
One of his best-known books, "Révolutions" (2003) takes up some of his persistent preoccupations, including memory, cultural conflict and his own past, and takes place in a dizzying array of times and places. Its action moves from its main character's student days in the 1950s and '60s in Nice, London and Mexico, to the experience of a French soldier in the revolutionary army in the 1790s, to the story of a female slave in the 1800s.
Marc Fumaroli, a professor at the Collège de France and a member of the Académie Française, said that while he was pleased that Le Clézio had won, he believed it was because he wrote about subjects guaranteed to appeal to the Swedish Academy.
"This ecological dimension can only please the Swedes," he said in an interview. "What is left of the universal qualities of literature that the academy is meant to uphold?" He said the factors that dictated the choice were "local criteria" and not "universal."
"We are in an ideological bent, not purely literary," he said.

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Playwright Edward Albee, whose credits include Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Zoo Story, has gained a sort of cranky perspective when it comes to awards. "All prizes are peculiar," he says. "There's politics in everything, and some judges just don't know what they're doing."
Albee points to a long list of great 20th century writers who were passed over by the Nobel judges: Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, Jorge Luis Borges, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov and W.H. Auden.
Novelist Richard Russo says you could create a pretty good award out of just that list. Russo won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for his novel Empire Falls. He was baffled when the Swedish Academy's permanent secretary, Horace Engdahl, told the Associated Press last month that "Europe still is the center of the literary world … not the United States."
Russo called the statement "more curious than anything else. This idea of suggesting that literature is in a physical place — that doesn't make sense to me at all." Nor did it make sense to Russo when Engdahl charged that the United States does not participate in the "big dialogue" of literature.
"I think the book itself is the dialogue," says Russo. "If I or any other writer writes a great book, then that book is our contribution to the dialogue."
Some American Writers Were Furious
At least one writer responded to Engdahl's statement with language unprintable here. An essayist for the online magazine Slate proposed that the U.S. secede from what he called "the sham the Nobel Prize for literature has become."
That makes author Francine Prose chuckle. "Actually, I'd prefer to retain our ties with the international community, as attenuated as it might be," she says.
Prose is president of the Pen American Center, which champions writers' rights around the world. Because three of the past four Nobel literature winners have been outspoken critics of the U.S. and its foreign policy, some people have accused the Swedish Academy of favoring anti-American writers. Prose is not so sure.
"Any prize goes through phases," she says, "and it seems as if, for a certain number of years, they're rewarding certain kinds of books, but the range is — and always has been — really quite enormous."
Still, Prose says that Engdahl had a point when he criticized U.S. publishers for not promoting more literature in translation. Novelist Junot Diaz — who won this year's Pulitzer Prize in literature — says something good could actually come out of this controversy.
"If this encourages the average American to read one more book in translation — if only to spite the kind of sneering Eurocentric elitism of this one individual — that's not a bad thing," he says.
Nor would it be so bad, Diaz says, if it incited U.S. publishers to translate more work from other parts of the world. He has a tip for them: the young Mexican writer Martin Solares. His work, Diaz says, is brilliant, but mostly unavailable in English — or, in Swedish.

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It did not take long for American writers to rise to the bait. The Washington Post's Michael Dirda pointed out that it was Engdahl who displayed "an insular attitude towards a very diverse country": It is a bit rich for a citizen of Sweden, whose population of 9 million is about the same as New York City's, to call the United States "isolated." David Remnick noted that the Swedish Academy itself has been guilty of conspicuous ignorance over a very long period: "You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures."
All of these criticisms are, of course, true. But the real scandal of Engdahl's comments is not that they revealed a secret bias on the part of the Swedish Academy. It is that Engdahl made official what has long been obvious to anyone paying attention: The Nobel committee has no clue about American literature. America should respond not by imploring the committee for a fairer hearing but by seceding, once and for all, from the sham that the Nobel Prize for literature has become.
When Engdahl accuses American writers of being raw and backward, of not being up-to-date on the latest developments in Paris or Berlin, he is repeating a stereotype that goes back practically to the Revolutionary War. It was nearly 200 years ago that Sydney Smith, the English wit, famously wrote in the Edinburgh Review: "In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?" Ironically, though, while Engdahl decries American provincialism today, for most of the Nobel's history, it was exactly its "backwardness" that the Nobel committee most valued in American literature.
Just look at the kind of American writer the committee has chosen to honor. Pearl Buck, who won the prize in 1938, and John Steinbeck, who won in 1962, are almost folk writers, using a naively realist style to dramatize the struggles of the common man. Their most famous books, The Good Earth and The Grapes of Wrath, fit all too comfortably on junior-high-school reading lists. Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Prize, in 1930, wrote broad satires on American provincialism with nothing formally adventurous about them.
Such writers reflected back to Europe just the image of America they wanted to see: earnest, crude, anti-intellectual. There was a brief moment, after World War II, when the Nobel Committee allowed that America might produce more sophisticated writers. No one on either side of the Atlantic would quarrel with the awards to William Faulkner in 1949 or Ernest Hemingway in 1954. But in the 32 years since Bellow won the Nobel, there has been exactly one American laureate (not counting writers from other countries who became American citizens)*, Toni Morrison, whose critical reputation in America is by no means secure. To judge by the Nobel roster, you would think that the last three decades have been a time of American cultural drought rather than the era when American culture and language conquered the globe.
But that, of course, is exactly the problem for the Swedes. As long as America could still be regarded as Europe's backwater—as long as a poet like T.S. Eliot had to leave America for England in order to become famous enough to win the Nobel—it was easy to give American literature the occasional pat on the head. But now that the situation is reversed, and it is Europe that looks culturally, economically, and politically dependent on the United States, European pride can be assuaged only by pretending that American literature doesn't exist. When Engdahl declares, "You can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world," there is a poignant echo of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard insisting that she is still big, it's the pictures that got smaller.
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Nothing gives the lie to Engdahl's claim of European superiority more effectively than a glance at the Nobel Prize winners of the last decade or so. Even Austrians and Italians didn't think Elfriede Jelinek and Dario Fo deserved their prizes; Harold Pinter won the prize about 40 years after his significant work was done. To suggest that these writers are more talented or accomplished than the best Americans of the last 30 years is preposterous.
What does distinguish the Nobel Committee's favorites, however, is a pronounced anti-Americanism. Pinter used the occasion of his Nobel lecture in 2005 to say that "the crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless" and to call for "Bush and Blair [to] be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice." Doris Lessing, who won the prize last year, gave an interview dismissing the Sept. 11 attacks as "neither as terrible nor as extraordinary as [Americans] think," adding: "They're a very naive people, or they pretend to be."
It would be nice to think that the Swedish Academy was not endorsing such views when they selected Pinter and Lessing or the similarly inclined José Saramago and Günter Grass. But to prove the bad faith of Engdahl's recent criticisms of American literature, all you have to do is mention a single name: Philip Roth. Engdahl accuses Americans of not "participating in the big dialogue of literature," but no American writer has been more cosmopolitan than Roth. As editor of Penguin's "Writers From the Other Europe" series, he was responsible for introducing many of Eastern Europe's great writers to America, from Danilo Kiš to Witold Gombrowicz; his 2001 nonfiction book Shop Talk includes interviews with Milan Kundera, Ivan Klima, and Primo Levi. In his own fiction, too, Roth has been as adventurously Postmodern as Calvino while also making room for the kind of detailed realism that has long been a strength of American literature. Unless and until Roth gets the Nobel Prize, there's no reason for Americans to pay attention to any insults from the Swedes.