Patrick Modiano, Beware: The Curse of the Literature Nobel Prize

Caribbean poet Derek Walcott, who won the prize in 1992, recalls a […] burst of joy followed by a prolonged state of siege. “The phone rang endlessly, and a lot of invitations came. It was a really terrible time, not terrible in a bad sense but terrible in how exacting it is. For a while you can’t work, because it’s so demanding.” What Walcott characterizes as the Nobel’s less than phenomenal influence on his book sales didn’t make up for the chaotic fuss. What did soothe him, however, was the prize money, as he frankly and cheerfully admits. “It was almost a million dollars,” he recalls. “What I’m really grateful for is the fact that I could build a very nice house in a very nice little bay in St. Lucia with a studio.”

Once labeled a potential “kiss of death” by novelist Saul Bellow, after he won the prize in 1976, the Nobel can be a bittersweet distinction. For William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, the prize was a swan song, a tribute to past masterpieces whose greatness their subsequent work did not approach. For others, it’s just a very prestigious distraction. Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, the 1996 laureate, complained that the prize destroyed her cherished privacy by turning her into an “official person.” According to Jonathan Galassi, editor in chief of Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Gordimer’s and Walcott’s publisher), the prize can “inundate” a writer. “People,” he says, “want a piece of your ass even more than they did before.”