1983 As his biographer, John Carey, records, William Golding (a Grand Old Man of English fiction, at 72) received the first intimation that he was to be 1983 Nobel laureate by phone, at ten o’clock on the morning of 6 October. He was so informed by a Swedish journalist who said, tantalisingly, that he had a ‘50–50 chance’. The award was confirmed by lunchtime.
The 50 per cent adverse possibility was, despite the notorious secretiveness of the Stockholm literary committee, made public in the days thereafter. One of the judges, 77-year-old poet Artur Lindkvist, had single-handedly tried to blackball Golding’s nomination in favour of a Senegalese poet, Léopold Senghor (he was also the first president of his country after its independence). Senghor (five years older than Golding) was well known in the francophone literary world. He had been elected a member of l’Académie française on 2 June 1983, the first African writer to be so honoured.
Lindkvist explained: ‘I simply didn’t consider Golding to possess the international weight needed to win the prize … I admire Anthony Burgess very much. He is of far greater worth than Golding and is much more controversial.’ The author of Lord of the Flies was, he concluded, ‘too nice’.
Golding was chronically self-doubting. Lindkvist’s spiteful criticisms soured what should have been the crowning moment of his literary career.