DELAY IN ANNOUNCEMENT OF NOBEL IN LITERATURE

CBC Canada
Oct 5 2006

This year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for literature will not be
announced until Oct. 12 at the earliest, Swedish Academy officials
said Thursday.

The announcement of the Nobel Laureate in Literature is often revealed
during the same week as the science prizes or in advance of those
prizes in the first week of September.

The Nobel Foundation announces a date a few days in advance to give
journalists time to travel to Sweden, but never sets a firm date for
the announcement.

A note on its website Thursday said the announcement of the literature
prize would be made "at a later date."

The Nobel Prize for Peace is to be announced next week.

Neither the process by which candidates are selected nor the names
of nominees are revealed by the Swedish-based academy, which has been
giving out the prize, named for scientist and inventor Alfred Nobel,
since 1901.

Last year’s winner of the literature prize was British playwright
Harold Pinter.

This year, speculation centres on Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist
who was tried on charges of "insulting the Turkish identity" for
saying that the deaths of Armenians in 1915 was a "genocide."

The official line in Turkey is that the Armenians died at Ottoman
hands in a war situation and writers who suggest otherwise can be
prosecuted under a controversial section of the Turkish penal code.

Also suggested as possible candidates are the Syrian poet Ali Ahmad
Said, U.S. writer Philip Roth and Canadian Margaret Atwood.