The full list of writers nominated for the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature includes just one woman.
As Kaj Scheueler reported for Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, newly opened archives from the Swedish Academy have given the public a window into the Nobel Prize in Literature judging panel’s deliberations in 1971. That year, Pablo Neruda ultimately took the prize—but according to the archives, Anders Österling, Nobel committee chair, initially wondered if the “increasingly dominant communist tendency in his poetry is compatible with the purpose of the Nobel prize.”
Among the Swedish Academy’s unveiled documents is the judging committee’s list of 90 contenders for the 1971 prize. There are some familiar faces—like Nabokov, Borges, James Baldwin, Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams—as well as less well-known figures. Notably, there’s only one woman on the list: expressionistic Estonian poet and translator Marie Under, who was nominated for the Nobel eight times and helped found the Estonian Writers Union.
Here’s the full list:
Edward Albee
Jorge Amado
Jerzy Andrzejewski
Louis Aragon
José-Maria Arguedas
Wystan Hugh Auden
Riccardo Bacchelli
James Baldwin
Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay
Mikola Bažan
Saul Bellow
Jorge Luis Borges
Jawad Boulos
Michel Butor
Heinrich Bōll
Elias Canetti
Alejo Carpentier
David Cecil
Aimé Césaire och Léopold Sédar Senghor
André Chamson
Fazil Hüsnü Daglarca
Tsendin Damdinsüren
Paul Demiéville
Lawrence Durrell
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Rabbe Enckell
Salvador Espriu
Romain Gary
Maurice Genevoix
William Golding
Günter Grass
Graham Greene
Jorge Guillén
Paavo Haavikko
William Heinesen
Vladimir Holan
Eugène Ionesco
Roman Jakobson
Eyvind Johnson
Younghill Kang
Richard E. Kim
Miroslav Krleža
Karl Krolow
Erich Kästner
Arthur Koestler
Philip A. Larkin
Siegfried Lenz
Väinö Linna
Compton Mackenzie
Archibald MacLeish
Hugh L. MacLennan
Salvador de Madariaga
André Malraux
Jacques Maritain
Harry Martinson
Miguel Melendres de Tarragone
Arthur Miller
Eugenio Montale
Henry de Montherlant
Vilhelm Moravia
Vladimir Nabokov
Pablo Neruda
Fritiof Nilsson Piraten
Mikhail Nu’ayma
Ezra Pound
Evaristo Ribera Chevremont
Yannis Ritsos
Alain Robb-Grillet
Tadeusz Różewicz
Hans Ruin
Georges Schehadé
Arno Schmidt
Robert Shih
Claude Simon
Charles Percy Snow
Zaharia Stancu
Marie Under
Gérard Walschap
Mika Waltari
Simon Vestdijk
Sándor Weöres
Patrick White
Elie Wiesel
Thornton Wilder
José Garcia Villa
Henry Williamson
Angus Wilson
Carl Zuckmayer
Tennessee Williams
