Sweden’s Leftists Angered by Mario Vargas Llosa’s Nobel Prize in Literature

Left-wing critics in Sweden are incensed that the Swedish Academy has awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature to an ex-socialist. Jonah Norberg, a classical liberal writer from Sweden, explains in the online magazine spiked. Here’s an excerpt:

People who never voiced any concerns about the politics of other Nobel Prize winners – like Wisława Szymborska, who wrote poetic celebrations of Lenin and Stalin; Günter Grass, who praised Cuba’s dictatorship; Harold Pinter, who supported Slobodan Milošević; José Saramago, who purged anti-Stalinists from the revolutionary newspaper he edited – thought that the Swedish Academy had finally crossed a line. Mario Vargas Llosa’s politics apparently should have disqualified him from any prize considerations. He is after all a classical liberal in the tradition of John Locke and Adam Smith.

Norberg’s article is absorbing, incisive, and worth reading in its entirety.