STOCKHOLM, Sweden - Bad news for American writers hoping for a Nobel Prize next week: the top member of the award jury believes the United States is too insular and ignorant to compete with Europe when it comes to great writing.

Counters the head of the U.S. National Book Foundation: "Put him in touch with me, and I'll send him a reading list."

As the Swedish Academy enters final deliberations for this year's award, permanent secretary Horace Engdahl said it's no coincidence that most winners are European.

"Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world ... not the United States," he told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview Tuesday.

He said the 16-member award jury has not selected this year's winner, and dropped no hints about who was on the short list. Americans Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates usually figure in speculation, but Engdahl wouldn't comment on any names.

Speaking generally about American literature, however, he said U.S. writers are "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture," dragging down the quality of their work.

"The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature," Engdahl said. "That ignorance is restraining."

His comments were met with fierce reactions from literary officials across the Atlantic.

"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," said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker.

"And if he looked harder at the American scene that he dwells on, he would see the vitality in the generation of Roth, Updike, and DeLillo, as well as in many younger writers, some of them sons and daughters of immigrants writing in their adopted English. None of these poor souls, old or young, seem ravaged by the horrors of Coca-Cola."

Harold Augenbraum, executive director of the foundation which administers the National Book Awards, said he wanted to send Engdahl a reading list of U.S. literature.

"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," he said.

"In the first place, one way the United States has embraced the concept of world culture is through immigration. Each generation, beginning in the late 19th century, has recreated the idea of American literature."

He added that this is something the English and French are discovering as immigrant groups begin to take their place in those traditions.

The most recent American to win the award was Toni Morrison in 1993. Other American winners include Saul Bellow, John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway.

As permanent secretary, Engdahl is a voting member of and spokesman for the secretive panel that selects the winners of what many consider the most prestigious award in literature.

The academy often picks obscure writers and hardly ever selects best-selling authors. It regularly faces accusations of snobbery, political bias and even poor taste.

Since Japanese writer Kenzaburo Oe won the award in 1994, the selections have had a distinct European flavor. Nine of the subsequent laureates were Europeans, including last year's winner, Doris Lessing of Britain. Of the other four, one was from Turkey and the others from South Africa, China and Trinidad. All had strong ties to Europe.

Engdahl said Europe draws literary exiles because it "respects the independence of literature" and can serve as a safe haven.

"Very many authors who have their roots in other countries work in Europe, because it is only here where you can be left alone and write, without being beaten to death," he said. "It is dangerous to be an author in big parts of Asia and Africa."

Kwame Anthony Appiah, a leading African scholar and a professor of philosophy at Princeton University, said that there has been a long history of American writers being influenced by authors elsewhere and in turn having an impact overseas, including in Europe.

"Is America really a diminished presence in the literary world? That's not the sense you get looking at European book stores. I'm always amazed how many of the books in German or Italian bookstores are translations from American English," Appiah said.

"The big dialogue of literature isn't just going on in Paris and Frankfurt ... I assume even Engdahl agrees it is not centered on Stockholm," he said.

The Nobel Prize announcements start next week with the medicine award on Monday, followed by physics, chemistry, peace and economics. Next Thursday is a possible date for the literature prize, but the Swedish Academy by tradition only gives the date two days before.

Engdahl suggested the announcement date could be a few weeks away, saying "it could take some time" before the academy settles on a name.

Each Nobel Prize includes a $1.3 million purse, a gold medal and a diploma. The awards are handed out Dec. 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel's death in 1896.

QFT, the US has been in head-up-ass mode for at least the last eight years, probably the last thirty. Our hostility to foreign culture and foreign ideas is so deep-seated that it scares me sometimes...

At least we do still have talented artists, although they may be bogged down in the same problems as the rest of us.

Pretty much.

David Foster Wallace's zombie is going to kick his ass.

I wondered if Mr. Remnick would comment on this. As a dedicated reader of "The New Yorker," I have enjoyed his editorship.

The last time an American won the prize was in 1993. Hahaha. The last time before that was Steinbeck in 1962. Hahaha. Stupid American authors.

But I gotta admit, that was a damn good comeback about how they ignored Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov.

Not everyone lives in a continent with such a rich amount of cultures in such a small area.

Us Aussies are completely surrounded by water and we only have 21 million people. A lot of our literature seems isolated from other Australians, let along other countries rofl.

Wha???

I would say Europe is many times worse in that regard.  They don't care about anything outside the europeon union. 

You think America is bad... look at countries like France... where in recent years they've had laws outright banning aspects other cultures because of their fear of immigration. (When they had the headscarf law... if they've ever even gotten rid of that.)

America is much more accepting of multiculturalism... heck it's basically the US' defining feature.

Aside from which... really looking at it politically when it's about literature?

Also comparing Europe on a wholes free speach laws vs America's is funny.

He's just your usual award show guy with an axe to grind and an overinflated sense of importance.

I think the point is that America lets immigrants bring other cultures into our melting pot of diversity, but outside of that, we don't really look to other countries at all. I know soooo many people who hate foreign films because they can't stand subtitles. It's stupid shit like that that makes me think Americans are culturally insulated and retarded.