In 2008, Horace Engdahl, the head of the Swedish Academy, was reported to have said that American novelists would never win the Nobel Prize for Literature, as the American novel was "too isolated and insular." | In 2008, Horace Engdahl, the head of the Swedish Academy, was reported to have said that American novelists would never win the Nobel Prize for Literature, as the American novel was "too isolated and insular." |