KUALA LUMPUR – Former Dewan Negara president Tan Sri Adam Kadir has been nominated for this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, the prestigious annual award by the Swedish Academy.
It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel and has been awarded annually since 1901 to an author from any country who has, in his words “in the field of literature provided the most outstanding work in an idealistic direction”.
Confirming his nomination, Adam told Bernama today that this was the third time in a row that he had been nominated since 2022.
“Hopefully, I’ll be third-time lucky,” he quipped when contacted.
Adam said he had written 17 books apart from hundreds of articles, essays and columns in local newspapers and magazines.
Adam, 81, said as a general rule, past winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature had been nominated three times. The nomination has been on the criterion of a life-long work with up-to-date writing productions.
For the record, no Southeast Asian writers have won the Nobel Prize for Literature so far. Rabindranath Tagore of India was the first Asian to have made it in 1913.
Adam said he had been writing in various genres since his school days in the Sultan Abu Bakar School in Kuantan and winning various prizes at state and national levels.
He continued his writing when he was an undergraduate at Universiti Malaya in the 1960s, during which he got his first novel published.
Adam received his LLM in Corporate and Commercial Laws from the University of London, MSc from Ohio University and AMP from Harvard University in the United States. – February 8, 2024