Regarding Nobel literature laureates as role models would be a mistake. Half the American winners alone – Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, John Steinbeck – were alcoholics. Hemingway killed himself; Kawabata Yasunari probably did too, and the aforementioned Harry Martinson tried ineffectually to end his life with scissors during the outcry over his questionable shared victory. Maurice Maeterlinck was exposed as a plagiarist, Günter Grass as having fought with the Waffen-SS. André Gide's long-running relationship with Marc Allégret began when the latter was 15. Sartre has been portrayed as benefiting from, in effect, the procuring of distressed young women by his partner, Simone de Beauvoir.
Tomas Tranströmer joins a curious club in which giants such as WB Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore, TS Eliot and Jean-Paul Sartre are outnumbered by obscure figures (often Scandinavian realist novelists or poets from Mediterranean or Latin countries) you've never heard of. Several should not be in at all, according to the contemporary interpretation of the prize's rules as excluding anyone except imaginative writers; the roll of honour includes the philosophers Henri Bergson, Rudolf Christoph Eucken and Bertrand Russell, the Roman historian Theodor Mommsen and Winston Churchill, whose chronicle of the second world war (put together by young researchers) secured his entry as a historian. Erik Axel Karlfeldt, a Swedish poet, was not only dead when awarded the 1931 prize but until his death had been permanent secretary of the awarding body, the Swedish Academy.
Two more little-known Swedes who were then academy members, Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson, were scandalously jointly honoured in 1974. Politically, the laureates range from Knut Hamsun, who eulogised Hitler, to Pablo Neruda, who composed an ode to Stalin, and Mikhail Sholokhov, who had been a Supreme Soviet member under him; left-of-centre views perhaps predominate (Jorge Luis Borges's support for rightwing regimes is said to have put paid to his chances), but conservatives such as Eliot, François Mauriac and VS Naipaul have received the nod too. Creatively, authors at the avant-garde end of modernism or writing experimental novels, plays or poetry after 1945 are scarce – Eliot, William Faulkner, Samuel Beckett, Claude Simon and José Saramago are the most obvious adventurers. Conversely, Proust, Joyce and other difficult authors have been shunned.
