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I was amazed at how low the Nobel Prize for literature was in the news agenda last week. In case you didn't know, the award was given to Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer.

News bulletins around the world hardly mentioned it even though the it wasn't a particularly busy day for breaking global news.

Does this reflect the lack of interest in literature and - in particular - in poetry.

Tomas Transtromer is neither a dissident, nor he is fighting for human rights. He is just a great poet.

Clear and succinct, sad and melancholic like a great poet should be.

So it seems that when the Nobel Prize is awarded for purely literary merit, there's no news story.

The Nobel Prize for literature is without doubt is the biggest literary accolade in the world. The anticipation of it can drive authors to distraction.

I've heard that one famous English writer - who has more than enough literary awards already - secludes himself at home and waits for a telephone call from Stockholm every October.

One of the most acclaimed Soviet writers once rang me asking what he could do to get a Nobel Prize: as if I was responsible for awarding it.

Some Russian writers even publish their would-be Nobel Prize lectures as a literary manifesto.

The Nobel prize for literature has been always a matter of controversy.

The award's critics are quick to name those literary giants such as Tolstoy and Joyce, Kafka and Borges, Nabokov and Muzil who have not received the award.

But more tellingly, around a third of the authors awarded the prize have disappeared from the literary annals almost without a trace.

: have you read - or even heard of - the writing of some of the winners even from the last 15-20 years?

Politics has apparently played a role in a number of Swedish Academy decisions.

At the peak of the controversial decisions around ten years ago, one famous French literary figure sarcastically exclaimed: "It will be no wonder if next year the prize will be given to some obscure Uzbek writer or poet because of the dictatorship there".

So beyond a national literary pride, I could see the point he was making.

There were indeed moments when candidates appear in the news before the announcement, extolling his or her causes, only weeks later do those causes go off the radar once the prize has been given.

Critics say that prize-giving bookmakers have developed a whole industry of betting on candidates (though even the list of the candidates is never released).

Thus this year a great deal of hype has been created around the name of Bob Dylan whose chances were put as high as 5:1 and according to the bookmakers themselves nearly a third of people placing bets on the outcome of the literature prize chose him.

It was this story that was the news highlight of the whole process, rather than the announcement of the actual winner.

Once upon a time winning the Nobel prize for literature was a life-changing event.

I read the memoirs of the wife of the great Russian writer Ivan Bunin. In 1933, she sent him from France, where they lived the life of emigres, to Stockholm to receive the award.

She writes that upon his departure Bunin's trousers were so worn out, that one could see his body as an x-ray.

When he returned he was able not just to pay back all the debts he had acquired over the years of migrant's hardship, but also to buy a villa and live the rest of his life in a decent manner.

In monetary terms the change is not so drastic now - the winner of The X Factor and other talent shows receive more financial gain.

But as I said in the beginning it's the foremost literary accolade.

And in a way I do sympathize to the Swedish Academy in their ambivalent perennial dilemma... On the one hand you want everyone to talk about the new literary 'immortals', so by this token you tend to choose someone who makes a splash in the 'puddle' of world news.

But on the other hand there's an ocean of literature with profound layers and layers where human eye, mind or soul - let alone news - rarely reaches and silence is twinned with it...

As the winner of this year Tomas Transtromer wrote:

A blue light
radiates from my clothing.
Midwinter.
Clattering tambourines of ice.
I close my eyes.
There is a silent world
there is a crack
where the dead
are smuggled across the border.