Let's start at the top: the Nobel Prize for literature, universally considered the most prestigious award a writer can attain -- but why? According to Burton Feldman, author of the new book "The Nobel Prize: A History of Genius, Controversy and Prestige," the literary Nobel owes most of its Olympian aura to its sister prizes in physics, chemistry and medicine. "The science juries have long chosen far more impressive laureates than have the literary judges. Planck, Rutherford, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac, Pauling, Crick and Watson, Feynman -- a steady procession of greatness or the nearest equivalent." By contrast, the early Nobels in literature went to a parade of now-forgotten authors while -- as Nobel-watchers love to point out -- the likes of Leo Tolstoy, Bertolt Brecht, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka went unhonored.

The reason for these omissions lies in the administration of the awards. The winner is chosen by the 18 members of the Swedish Academy, an organization founded in 1786 by King Gustaf III in order to work for the "purity, vigour and majesty" of the Swedish language. Alfred Nobel, who in 1900 willed his considerable fortune (mostly earned through the invention of dynamite and the manufacture of munitions) to the foundation of the prizes, chose this unlikely body of scholars as the arbiters of the literature honor. At the time, the academy was nearly moribund, but it's never been a font of youthful, or even middle-aged, vigor. Members serve for life, have always tended to be elderly and in the beginning set themselves firmly against the upstart writers of the 20th century. You can pretty much write off the first 20 years of winners, a disproportionate number of which were Swedish or Scandinavian.

Today, the academicians are still mostly old men, some of whom wearily, and publicly, long for retirement. Two others -- Kerstin Ekman and Lars Gyllensten, have boycotted the meetings since 1989 to protest academy secretary Sture Allen's refusal to allow the body as a whole to denounce Iran's fatwah on Salman Rushdie. Literature professor Knut Ahnlund is also boycotting the proceedings until Allen is replaced, and has accused the secretary of hogging a spot on every committee. Allen does seem to be a flashpoint: Unnamed academicians described him to New Yorker contributor Michael Specter as "an intellectual accountant" and as someone "who doesn't even read."

This year, however, another academy member suffered the spotlight, as critics called attention to Goram Malmqvist's stake in the career of the 2000 winner of the literature Nobel, Gao Xingjian. As Gao's Swedish translator, the retired professor of Chinese language and literature helped negotiate Gao's switch to a new Swedish publisher, abandoning one that Malmqvist deemed hadn't done enough to promote the Chinese writer's work. The problem is, he did this before the 2000 literature Nobel was announced, which suggests that Malmqvist had leaked the top-secret identity of the laureate before its official announcement in order to interest the new publisher.

All this infighting and scandal doesn't seem to tarnish the Nobel's luster much, though. Most observers see a greater danger in the possibility that the prize will come to seem irrelevant. As the academy struggles to make up for an early history of ignoring those who write in non-European languages, the winners tend to be unfamiliar to Western readers and not immediately available in translation -- which tends to dampen the excitement. "I don't know anyone who takes Nobel seriously," says Newsweek book critic David Gates. "It's obvious that the committee's outlook is very global and very politically correct. I always assume it's someone I've never heard of who is only marginally in English translation. Toni Morrison was a good choice, the ideal Nobel laureate: high profile, politically OK and a good writer." Charles McGrath, editor of the New York Times Book Review, feels the prize has become a less entertaining spectacle: "You can't dope it out anymore at all. Now it's just a great mystery."

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"