“In Europe, the term ‘Nobelisable’ is used freely to mean a writer who could perfectly well win the Nobel prize. Every small country has one – sometimes two. Writers are often identified as being Nobelisable for similar reasons. The Nobel prize carries an aura of the writer’s life as a public one; of collective identity voiced, shaped or advocated by a visionary, perhaps even brave, individual. The writer as unacknowledged legislator, maybe, but nevertheless visibly engaged with their own society. There is something of this aura behind suggestions that the decision-making of the Nobel committee is ‘politicised’. But maybe these suggestions have it back to front.”