This book has an interesting but slightly reductive take on how prestige works in the arts: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/artworld-prestige-97...
Why else would the premier restaurant review have been started by a tire company? It's all path dependence, and once you get enough momentum behind one choice it becomes self reinforcing.
Yes, I am trying to.
Because a rich Swede endowed it over a century ago, and its had that time to build up prestige.
It's sort of like why Harvard is so prestigious: it was the first American University, its existed continuously, and has always ran itself like it was elite.
> I think it is a bit strange how we fetisihize the Nobel above all others.
My guess it's one of the oldest extant awards of its kind, if not the oldest.
This scandal (and the hiatus) might allow a competitor to emerge as the most prestigious award in the field of literature, but I doubt such award will have the same popular awareness, because the Nobel's breadth helps a lot with it's fame.
These awards systems with arbitrary judges are far from fair.
With regard to Borges, he shares the same problem in terms of female characters as Cormac McCarthy as mentioned above. Plus, there is a real lack of emotional depth to Borges’ work. His themes may interest anoraks like ourselves, but I don’t think he is a truly universal figure.
A literature prize like the Nobel is by definition a thing targeted towards literature buffs, and Borges is a god among gods for those kind of people (of which I'm a part of), with or without female characters (come to think of it, I can't remember that many male characters in his books either).
Anyway, I stopped taking the Nobel literature prizes all that seriously the moment when I realized that they hadn't given it to Proust (his duchesse de Guermantes is one of the most important female characters in the history of literature) and Kafka.
The committee for the literature prize has contained some prestigious literary figures themselves, so it is to a slight degree a judgement of peers. Secondly, the membership of the committee has historically represented a high society that many authors have been members of themselves, or who hoped to have that high society among their audience. Go through the Nobel ceremony archives and you can see some writers getting quite emotional that they are there among the committee and the invited guests.