Notable writers who have written in an L2 ("Exophony")

[kleene*star]

I hate that the first author that came to my mind is Ayn Rand.

[rpg]

In this particular case the narrative is obvious--Esperanto enthusiasts looking to claim more legitimacy for Esperanto as a language of literature.

I've never read his work and it's possible it's exemplary, but this particular claim irritates me whenever I see it.

Or that, as you acknowledge as a possibility, the particular work is good enough to be nominated? And only happens to be in Esperanto. It looks to me like you're the looking for an opportunity to put out anti-Esperanto propaganda.

If a nominee was writing in some minor language, and maybe won, would you immediately think it was a positive discrimination act and people merely trying to promote it? If not, why not?

You are getting reflexively defensive and projecting your own preconceptions and biases. Calling what I wrote "anti-Esperanto propaganda" is frankly insulting especially when you didn't engage with any of the substance of what I said, which was not "anti-Esperanto" in the slightest. I don't hate myself enough to want to derail a perfectly lovely thread with some tiresome Esperanto argument, believe me.

Rather, I'm coming from the perspective of someone who happens to know quite a fair bit about the Nobel Prize in Literature specifically. It's not the Esperanto part, it's the whole using "nominated for a Nobel Prize in Literature" as a mark of recognition or prestige that I took issue with and summarized the reasons why, which I see no reason to waste my time repeating. It's just a PSA that if you see anyone trying to claim this as a signifier of something meaningful you should likely ignore it, and 100x more so when it refers to a supposed nomination that happened within the last 50 years. It's nothing like "nominated for Best Picture" or "shortlisted for the Booker", where these statuses already confer some amount of recognition and approval in and of themselves. The equivalent for the literature Nobel would be to be shortlisted in their deliberations (but again this won't be known until 50 years later).

The Esperanto part is only relevant insofar as it presents a very obvious motive for why people would repeat and amplify this claim. That's not "anti-Esperanto propaganda" to point out, that's just basic common sense. I've heard it repeated a few times over the years (which is why I have looked into it and why it caught my eye in this thread) and it's usually been in the context of some Esperanto debate where someone brings Auld up to defend Esperanto literature. I assume that's where Deinonysus heard about it too.

And for the record, though I think your post was made in bad faith, to respond to a couple things: the Prize is not awarded for a "particular work" but rather for a body of work. And while, as I said, nominations are pretty meaningless for this prize, if the Swedish Academy did award someone writing in a "minor language" I would probably celebrate it along with the other people who track this kind of stuff. The literature Nobel has a checkered and often controversial history and has a strong European bias--and that's on top of the broader bias of "world literature" as a whole towards more popular languages, as has been touched on by some others in this thread too.

[Le Baron]

You are getting reflexively defensive and projecting your own preconceptions and biases.

That old chestnut. Don't you want to add: 'shaking with rage and bitterness' to increase the vivid image that I'm just being irrational as compared to your cool reasining? I don't hide my disdain for tedious Esperanto knocking. You claim it isn't, however:

what I said, which was not "anti-Esperanto" in the slightest

Isn't quite helped by this:

In this particular case the narrative is obvious--Esperanto enthusiasts looking to claim more legitimacy for Esperanto as a language of literature.

This is hardly a neutral observation. It is 'obvious' to you that "Esperanto enthusiasts" (rather than just 'Esperantists') are always looking to claim legitimacy for the language as being capable of producing worthy literature. Perhaps so, because this is the sort of sneering they've always been up against.

The Esperanto part is only relevant insofar as it presents a very obvious motive for why people would repeat and amplify this claim. That's not "anti-Esperanto propaganda" to point out, that's just basic common sense. I've heard it repeated a few times over the years (which is why I have looked into it and why it caught my eye in this thread) and it's usually been in the context of some Esperanto debate where someone brings Auld up to defend Esperanto literature.

Indeed I've heard it repeated and it's a really common remark referring to dozens of writers. It seems to me actual 'common sense' that such a nomination claim would be mentioned by people who would rather have it that Esperanto isn't sidelined, and some 'official' recognition (whose veracity you go to great pains to put into question) perhaps seems worth mentioning. People can take it for what it is.

Whose post was in 'bad faith' really?

[jeff_lindqvist]

Honestly, I hope that doesn't become a trend. I get why some writers choose not to write in their NL, but if everyone starts writing in English, that would be a bit sad. English is lovely (it is my NL after all!) but I worry that some people choose utility/marketability above all else.

Cobbold moved to England when she was 19 and published her first book many years later, but still as long ago as in 1994.

Theodor Kallifatides emigrated from Greece to Sweden in his mid 20s, learned Swedish on his own, published his first book five years later (in 1969), and is still writing. In Swedish.

[Lawyer&Mom]

I’ve always been impressed with Andrei Codrescu, a Romanian author, essayist and poet who only moved to the United States at age twenty, but nevertheless has amazing facility writing and speaking in English. (He was a long time commentator on NPR, so I’ve heard him speak.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Codrescu

[Cainntear]

Indeed I've heard it repeated and it's a really common remark referring to dozens of writers.

Which is all well and good, but you can't just ignore the factual statement that nominations are not made public because it has someone who appears to be predisposed to disregard Esperanto. You could counter with the fact that reputable newspapers made the claim (his WP page points to his obituary in the Telegraph) but you didn't -- instead you simply pointed to some of rpg's words indicating antipathy to Esperanto as an ulterior motive and implicitly presented that as a justification for disregarding the factual content.

[Erisnimi]

Jerzy Kosiński was born in Poland in 1933 and moved to the United States in his twenties, whereupon he launched a literary career in English. Died in 1991. He has been accused of plagiarism, passing off fiction as his own experience, and not writing his own books - The Painted Bird (1965), a World War II story, seems to be the focus of much of the controversy. So, a controversial yet notable writer, I would say.

Another one of his well-known novels is the satire Being There (1971) which was made into a film in 1979.

[Nogon]

Yoko Tawada writes both in her native Japanese and in German. She emigrated to Germany at 22 years of age.

Saša Stanišić, of Bosnian origin, came to Germany as a teenager, and is now a well-known German author.

Both write great books (according to me).

[leosmith]

Hideo Levy

an American-born Japanese language author. Levy was born in California and educated in Taiwan, the US, and Japan. He is one of the first Americans to write modern literature in Japanese, and his work has won the Noma Literary New Face Prize and the Yomiuri Prize, among other literary prizes.

[Just_a_visitor]

Could I come up with two real Nobel laureates writing in their second language, who have not been mentioned yet and whom I really appreciate?
If I just missed their names in the discussion, my apologies.

They are, first, Joseph (Iosif) Brodsky who later in his life had to move to the US and tried to switch to English in some of his works - of which I'd mention a book of essays Watermark/Fondamenta d. Incurabili (Набережная неисцелимых).

Kazuo Ishiguro moved from Japan to Britain at about 6, so he's become bilingual, no doubt. But anyway - his first language spoken in the family was Japanese.

Also, many Jewish authors spoke Yiddish as their first language.

Oscar Wilde's French poem, already mentioned but not named, is Salome.
Translated to German, it was used as a libretto for R.Strauss's famous opera.

As to being loyal to their first language - no wonder. For established authors, it's their tool. Most of Russian emigrates kept writing in Russian, Nabokov being a striking exception - thanks, maybe, to his Anglophile upbringing.