The Nobel Literature Prize and Peacebuilding

Organized as part of the Cultural Olympiad for the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games, “The Nobel Laureates of Literature: An Olympic Gathering” featured the largest ever assembly of Nobel laureates in literature for a single occasion. It was expected that the eight writers in attendance, namely Joseph Brodsky, Czesław Miłosz, Toni Morrison, Kenzaburō Ōe, Octavio Paz, Claude Simon, Wole Soyinka, and Derek Walcott, would singularly promote the values of peacebuilding. Instead, the laureates demonstrated varying degrees of uneasiness. By close-reading the panel discussion transcript in conjunction with the writers’ Nobel lectures, this paper argues for an alternative reading of the Olympic Gathering as a platform where the artistic visions of the eight writers interacted with each other on topics related to mutual understanding, privacy, and communication. Rather than reinforcing the liturgy of global peacebuilding, the Nobel laureates transformed the Olympic Gathering into a critical space that simultaneously promotes and deconstructs its peacebuilding processes.