Your writing just isn't good enough for the Swedish Nobel Prize jury. Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Nobel prize jury, caused quite a stir last week by saying:

"Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the centre of the literary world ... not the United States,"

"The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature, That ignorance is restraining."

Consequently, this year's Nobel Prize for literature goes to a very European author, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. I had heard the name but have not read anything by this writer. I think there is only one novel by him on the German market. Unlike American authors who are disinclined "to participate in the big dialogue of literature", he travelled a lot in his life and allegedly his prose is characterized by sincere humaneness.

But there is hope, Joyce Carol Oates. here are a couple of big names that did not get the prize either, just to cheer you up: Joyce, Tolstoi, Brecht.

And Kafka even spent his whole life within the narrow streets of Prague.