Talk:Gunnar Ekelöf

Nobel Prize speculation
I just removed this:

"(It is curious that Ekelöf never won the Nobel Prize for Literature, which is awarded by the academy of which he was a member. It is possible that the academy has a rule against awarding the Nobel to its own members, in order to preserve objectivity. It is also possibly due to personal modesty.)"

It is not at all possible that the academy has had such a rule, since it has awarded the prize to four of its own members: Verner von Heidenstam (1916), Pär Lagerkvist (1951), Harry Martinson, and Eyvind Johnson (both 1974). Additionally, former member Erik Axel Karlfeldt received the prize posthumously in 1931. Nor, for that matter, is it particularly curious that Ekelöf didn't receive it. Far greater writers have been neglected. Tomasboij 12:54, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
 * I agree those lines were just a flourish and highly POV but it is true that since Lagerkvist (1951) the Academy has been reluctant to award its own members in any case, and the awarding of Martinson and Johnson in 1974 became highly controversial and sparked an incensed debate at home. Strausszek (talk) 03:33, 6 March 2010 (UTC)
 * For the record, Tomas Tranströmer who was awarded the prize in 2011, is not a member of the Academy, though he is very likely to have been asked under hand at some point if he would want to join (his schoolmate Kjell Espmark,. a fellow poet and a literary scholar, holds one of the seats). It used to be a long-running subject of speculation in the Swedish press whether he might win the award or was "off limits" to the Academy simply by virtue of being a Swedish writer.Strausszek (talk) 03:49, 25 September 2013 (UTC)
 * It seems clear that the removed quote was not appropriate. Chiswick Chap (talk) 09:40, 5 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Agree - for the record it was not one of my edits, though I later contributed a major part of the current text of the article.Strausszek (talk) 17:34, 27 February 2015 (UTC)

Claims in Wikipedia's voice, and Reliable Sources

 * We are required to be extremely careful about making claims ("this was a great book") in Wikipedia's voice: all such claims must be cited to a Reliable Source which for literary topics means a textbook, a scholarly paper, a known critic in the field. The "authors' calendar" is at best a lightweight source here, possibly usable for basic facts but not at all ideal for statements about quality of a work. It seems clear that the authors' calendar has been used at least as much as can be justified, probably rather more. We can't go on copying out more and more of what it says until the article mirrors that source – that's "close paraphrasing", a polite phrase for copyvio. The article needs to explore what major scholars and critics have to say about Ekelöf, and we probably need to attribute the claims so as not to take sides, i.e. "Doe states that Ekelöf's best work was his prose[23]. Roe disagrees, writing that his long poems ...[24]" Hope this is clear. Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:27, 31 July 2022 (UTC)