If an accolade for literary merit is to have much meaning, it should be awarded by people capable of discerning literary merit - rather than wielding a pair of oars or sitting in a TV studio.
That, he says, is because he is not capable of writing literary Arabic.
His goals in writing A Contract with God were to explore an area of Jewish-American history that he felt was underdocumented, while showing that capable of mature literary expression, at a time when it received little such regard as an artistic medium.
Dante himself made an important contribution to the debate on what should constitute a volgare illustre (an "illustrious popular speech") capable of rivaling Latin for literary and scholarly purposes.
It will flourish because it is the one literary form capable of absorbing all the others.
Above all, there is its profound importance as a symbol of "Englishness", capable of informing everything from a literary novel to a rock album.
"One of the most mercurial, protean figures in literary history, capable of producing violent reactions of love, admiration, ridicule or anger in those who knew him, and also in those who read him".
Having witnessed the Dresden firestorm first hand, Kurt Vonnegut eventually found a literary technique capable of preserving his experiences in the novel Slaughterhouse-Five, in which a character's death is remarked upon with the phrase, "so it goes".
Hannah attracted critical acclaim with his first novel, "Geronimo Rex," which was nominated for a National Book Award in 1972, a book that established him as a serious literary talent capable of stringing together tender, haunting sentences where peculiar words whir around each other, colliding unexpectedly.
