The Nobel Academy, with its seeming tendency to court political correctness in its selection of laureates, often earns the opprobrium it receives. So it was pleasing to come across the following, in a Guardian piece about French writer Patrick Modiano, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday:

The choice, announced in Stockholm, will disappoint anyone hoping for a writer who was not – once again – white, European and male, although the Canadian short story writer Alice Munro was last year’s winner.
[Nobel Academy permanent secretary Peter] Englund said of course Modiano was a white, European male but he was one who wrote great literature.
“We don’t work according to quotas, we are just trying to give the prize to excellence and we don’t concern ourselves too much with ‘well, now we should have someone from this continent or that gender’. It would make our work impossible.”

An award for great literature should be awarded . . . for great literature. What a refreshing idea!

(That said, whether the Nobel Prize for Literature as it is awarded nowadays accords with Alfred Nobel’s intentions — to honor someone who “during the preceding year . . . produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction” — is another matter.)