Murakami Haruki Receives Prestigious Cino Del Duca Award 2022

Japanese author Haruki Murakami has received the prestigious 2022 Cino Del Duca World Prize, an international literary prize that recognizes a novelist whose works convey a message of modern humanism.

“Taking inspiration from daily events, Murakami also blends surreal and magical incidents in his works,” judges said at the award ceremony in Paris on June 1.

An official from Belfond, which publishes Murakami’s novels in France, attended the ceremony on behalf of the author.

Murakami was unable to attend the event as Japan still had strict COVID-19 entry restrictions on travelers, including those returning to the country, so the publisher that publishes Murakami’s novels in France attended the ceremony on behalf of of the author.

What Murakami was able to do was give this editor a message he wrote to mark the occasion.

Although it was not read aloud at the ceremony, the editor mentioned that the message referred to “the role of novelists in the period after the beginning of the pandemic and the battle against COVID-19”

In the message, Murakami said to the effect: “We were supposed to have reached a state of calm, but everything went into turmoil and cracks appeared. In these times, one of the roles of novelists is to make readers face the dark reality.

The award is named after Cino Del Duca (1899-1967), a publishing entrepreneur from Italy.

The winner receives one of the largest literary prizes of 200,000 euros (about 27 million yen, or $208,000).

Interestingly, some of the previous winners include Mario Vargas Llosa and Patrick Modiano, and each of whom has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, will Murakami Haruki finally be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature soon?