The once wild-and-woolly literary award has entered its steady and serious era.

Finally, the Swedish Academy got it right.

2021’s Nobel laureate is a little-known novelist and literary critic who was born in Zanzibar and has lived in the United Kingdom since the 1960s.

Not Haruki Murakami, that’s for sure.

Years after scandal rocked the committee, there’s a new commitment to broadening the prize’s horizons. But “literary merit,” Olsson insists, remains “the absolute and only criterion.”

Not Haruki Murakami, that’s for sure.

In giving the award to Peter Handke, an apologist for Serbian war crimes, the Swedish Academy may have finally shown its true colors.