Cautious Optimism and a Danish Third World Literature Prize: Abdulrazak Gurnah and the ALOA Prize

Authors

Kirsten Holst Petersen

Abstract

Today literary prizes are the arbiters of excellence. This is both good and bad; often, in fact more bad than good, but in the case of the Danish literary prize for Third World literature, the ALOA prize it would seem to be good. It is, of course always possible to question the separation of 'Third World', 'Commonwealth' or 'post-colonial literature' from other varieties of literature, ghettorizing it in this way, but in this connection it must be important to look at the reasons for doing this. The purpose of the ALOA prize is to attract attention to literature from Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania, which has been translated into Danish. The committee finds that there IS a number of excellent books in this category, but they do not get the attention they deserve, due to the large number of books that are translated into Danish every year. As a second principle, the committee also wishes to introduce new and

Recommended Citation

Petersen, Kirsten Holst, Cautious Optimism and a Danish Third World Literature Prize: Abdulrazak Gurnah and the ALOA Prize, Kunapipi, 17(3), 1995.
Available at:https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol17/iss3/19