Doris Lessing has been announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (I hear listening to "Nightwaves").

More detail on this as it appears in the Press.

The only thing of hers I've ever read is her play 'Play With A Tiger', which never seems to be revived. 

Am I missing anything by not further exploring her oeuvre...or is she one of the large-ish group of lady writers whose works are inaccessible to the male mind?

Interesting stuff, Reiner....

I'm afraid I do find feminism a huge obstacle in many authors.....it's a bit like reading to the accompaniment of a loud pneumatic drill outside the window.

As to the Nobel....just how much prestige does it really carry these days? I know it remains the biggest (money) literary gong in the world, but there's a nagging suspicion that it tends to go to authors who are 'worhy', rather than good.

I remember being very annoyed when they gave the bauble to William Golding. Studying 'Lord Of The Flies' at school must have blighted so many young lives.

I think you have a point there, p_m.  There seems to be no awareness of Dutch art (aside from painting) outside Holland at all: you need to shout a bit louder! 

Though maybe it's a problem INSIDE Holland, too....I struggled, back in July, to find any CDs by Shocking Blue.  The shop assistants explained to me that because S.B. were an 'old band', there was little desire to keep their back catalogue before the public.  Which is a bit like being unable to buy anything by the Small Faces in the UK...

My favourite Nobel prizewinner was Knut Hamsun.

I sometimes have to go to the city of Perm', in the Urals - where the Nobel brothers worked for a while (their dynamite factory still stands, in the centre of town).  A local legend says that the elder of the two brothers was deeply smitten by the charms of a young lady of the town ("Ural girls" are said to be the most beautiful in Russia), and he proposed to her - but she dumped him for a mathemetician.  Nobel was so grief-stricken he closed-down the Perm' factory and moved the entire business elsewhere.

Coincidence or not, the Nobel Science Prize has almost never been awarded to mathemeticians.

One hopes the Literature prize isn't influenced by such old grudges? 

Surely Philip Roth isn't a mathemetician?

I can't imagine the Dutch shouting, Pim - you are too good-natured for that

Do you think that it's maybe the themes about which Dutch authors write that don't appeal in English-speaking countries?    Perhaps a bit too difficult and too deep to be saleable elsewhere?

Interesting point, Reiner. A lot of Dutch literature has been translated into German and some authors were successful in Germany, but not really in Britain or the United States.

But this is also the case with many authors from other countries. An interesting figure like the Austrian writer Heimito von Doderer never became famous in Britain, but he is known in France. The plays of Harold Pinter, Alan Ayckbourn and Noel Coward have all been performed in the Netherlands, but Terence Rattigan was never popular over here. The French author Paul Léautaud had a loyal audience in the Netherlands, but I don't believe many of his books were translated into English. I believe Graham Greene was a fan.

Good to read the Russians are still avid readers, Reiner.

I have to say that the Dutch reader has also become a bit isolationist during the last decades. Second-rate American novels are being translated into Dutch immediately, but I don't see that many translated books from other European countries, including Germany.

There was an item about translated literature on Night Waves not so long ago. Someone said that only lesser know American authors were seen as "foreign" by the British reader.

A few novels of Boris Akunin have been translated into Dutch but I don't believe they were very successful. I read somewhere that years ago, Paul Verhoeven wanted to make a film version of "The Winter Queen". According to the Internet Movie Data Base, it is still "in production" but I think Paul couldn't find the money for this adventure.