In this article: Ben Anderson Eka Kurniawan
By Shawn Hoo
Originally published in Straits Times.
Oct 18, 2025
Read the full article here.
By Shawn Hoo
Originally published in Straits Times.
Oct 18, 2025
South-east Asia, with a population of over 700 million, has exactly zero Nobel laureates in literature out of the 122 awarded. Have no worthy writers come out of the region or are the prize’s opaque processes unfair, unadventurous, unenlightened and simply unbothered by a far-flung and variegated region?
The question of South-east Asia being the “odd one out” – every other region seems to have had its turn – bothered the late political scientist Benedict Anderson, who, in his 2012 essay The Unrewarded, laid out the capricious patterns of the prize’s distribution and South-east Asia’s uneasy position in the laurel line-up.
The question of South-east Asia being the “odd one out” – every other region seems to have had its turn – bothered the late political scientist Benedict Anderson, who, in his 2012 essay The Unrewarded, laid out the capricious patterns of the prize’s distribution and South-east Asia’s uneasy position in the laurel line-up.
Read the full article here.
AFP / The Straits Times
