Nobel Archives Tawfiq al-Hakim Was Up for 1969 Prize

This article was last updated on April 16, 2022

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The Nobel Prize for Literature keeps their archives sealed for 50 years. The Complete Review reports that the 1969 archives are now in the public domain:

The 1969 Nobel — which was awarded to Samuel Beckett — was apparently a showdown between Beckett and André Malraux.

The complete list of 1969 nominees is now available. There were 103 authors nominated, including 28 first-time nominees who are marked with an X in the list.

Among the first-time nominees were writers who went on to win — such as Elias Canetti and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn — and some who didn’t, including Egyptian playwright and novelist Tawfiq al-Hakim.

It notes only that he was nominated by Shawky Deif.

Al-Hakim is remembered as a playwright — and it’s generally agreed that’s where he had the most impact — but he also wrote essays, memoir, short stories, and biting novels. Last year, the long-running Penguin Classics series finally released its first “classic” novel translated from Arabic: Al-Hakim’s Return of the Spirit, conveyed into English by William Hutchins.

Taha Hussein was also nominated in 1969, although he was not a newcomer to the list, and was the first Arabophone author to make his way into Nobel nominations, for which he was nominated at least fourteen times.

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