REUTERS:
WINNING THE Nobel prize turns writers into icons and takes best sellers far beyond their own culture, but there is a price to pay for often reclusive people whose work requires solitude; the media spotlight.
Tomorrow, a writer somewhere who may be unknown to most of the planet or almost a household name will get a call from the Swedish Academy which has awarded the top accolade in the world of letters since 1901. The phone will not stop ringing.
Chinese 2000 laureate Gao Xingjian said media interviews left him "no time for writing" and Polish emigre Isaac Bashevis Singer had to leave home and de-list his phone number in 1978.
COMPENSATIONS
There are compensations. The 10 million crown ($1.36 million) prize money buys a lot of typewriter ribbons and wide translation can mean a big jump in income.
"Now suddenly I have a huge readership and I never imagined this would happen to me," said Gao.
Some blink shyly in the spotlight like South Africa's J.M. Coetzee in 2003. Others lap it up: Irish poet Seamus Heaney said his 1995 prize brought "a carelessness I have long desired".
Two writers rejected it: Boris Pasternak of "Doctor Zhivago" fame in 1958, alleging he was chosen for political rather than literary reasons; and France's Jean-Paul Sartre six years later.
PLATFORM FOR PEACE
More often, the prize founded by the inventor of dynamite in peace-loving Sweden is used as a platform for peace in a world that American novelist William Faulkner said in his 1949 Nobel speech was filled with "a general and universal physical fear".
"The mission of art, of poetry, is not to make peace. Art is peace," Heaney said in his acceptance speech in Stockholm.
The Academy is secretive, leaving pundits to guess the winner based on whether the prize recently went to a novelist, poet or playwright and what was their gender, language and race.
