Nobel judge: There's nothing great about the American novel

There is no argument like a literary argument. You can criticise a nation's politics, or its cuisine, or even its dress-sense, but to describe a nation's books as "ignorant" is fighting talk.

If the authors are American and the insult is offered by the head of the committee which awards the world's most prestigious book prize, expect a vicious, transatlantic war of words.

Horace Engdahl is permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, the body which chooses the Nobel Prize for literature. In an interview with an American journalist this week, he dismissed the writing of the US – the land of Melville, Hemingway and Fitzgerald – as "too isolated, too insular". "They don't translate [foreign books] enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature," he said. "That ignorance is restraining."

American writers were "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture," he told the Associated Press. "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."

Literary cruise missiles immediately blasted off from the United States. "Put him in touch with me and I'll send him a reading list," said Harold Augenbraum, executive director of the US National Book Foundation.

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker magazine, suggested it was the Swedish Academy which had been convicted by literary history of ignorance and bad taste. Some of the greatest, and most admired, writers of the past century were denied the Nobel Prize, he said – including several Europeans.

"You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures," he said.

Mr Augenbraum added: "Such a comment makes me think that Mr Engdahl has read little of American literature outside the mainstream and has a very narrow view of what constitutes literature in this age."

The Swedish Academy is expected to announce the 2008 winner of the €1m Nobel literary prize next week. The short-list of five, though secret, is said to include two American novelists, Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates.

The comments have been interpreted in the US as meaning no American can expect to win while Mr Engdahl is in charge. The last US winner was Toni Morrison, in 1993, before he took over. Past US winners include John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway.

The Swedish literary critic – an expert on French literature and especially the French "structuralist" tradition of literary criticism – insisted yesterday that he had been misunderstood. Alfred Nobel, the explosives magnate who founded the prizes, had laid down that "no consideration whatsoever should be given to the nationality of the candidates," he said.

Mr Engdahl said that his own views on American literature were irrelevant. "The Nobel Prize is not a contest between nations but an award to individual authors," he said.

A senior French publishing executive, who declined to be named, suggested that Mr Engdahl was "partly right but also fundamentally wrong". "It is true that American publishers rarely buy books in translation from foreign languages. That is to America's shame and also its loss. But that does not mean all American contemporary literature is parochial or ignorant. Yes, it sometimes seems that the typical American novel is about a writer who has six friends who also happen to be writers. But there are also excellent modern American authors."

American authors are often found in the best-sellers' lists in Europe. British authors occasionally do well in the US, but foreign authors in translation almost never appear.

According to the British bookies Ladbrokes, the favourite to win the 2008 prize is the Italian writer and author Claudio Magris, whose best known work is a philosophical and historical essay on the river Danube.