Tolkien denied the Nobel Prize for bad storytelling - Telegraph

Tolkien denied the Nobel Prize for bad storytelling - Telegraph

JRR Tolkien, the author of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, was rejected by the Nobel Prize committee for poor storytelling and bad writing.

Tolkien, a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford who drew inspiration for his works from medieval literature, was nominated in 1961 by his close friend CS Lewis, another medieval expert who dabbled in fantasy literature. But according to Nobel Prize documents released after 50 years, one of the jury members, Anders Osterling, said that the work "has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality".

Other well-known names who were nominated and passed over that year include Robert Frost, Lawrence Durrell and EM Forster. Frost, an American poet who lived in England as a young man and forged a great friendship with his fellow poet Edward Thomas, was deemed to be too old. Durell was said to have an unpleasant "preoccupation with erotic complications". And Forster, who published his last novel A Passage to India in 1924, was "a shadow of his former self".

The eventual winner was the Yugoslavian writer Ivo Andric, whose writings draw on the folklore of his native Bosnia.