I agree. William Trevor is one of the greatest writers of this and the last century.
But I'll be happy if Philip Roth, long overdue, is a co-winner.

William Trevor. To my mind the greatest living writer in the English language. His stories and novels, set in Ireland or England, are profound without being pretentious, humane, moving, elegant--just plain beautiful!

I would love to second Steve from Manhattan's nomination of Roald Dahl if only he were still alive. Since he is not, i nominate Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club.
"You'll hunt elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center, and dig clams next to the skeleton of the Space Needle leaning at a forty-five-degree angle. We'll paint the skyscrapers with huge totem faces and goblin tikis, and every evening what's left of mankind will retreat to empty zoos and lock itself in cages as protection against bears and big cats and wolves that pace and watch us from outside the cage bars at night."

Hi Brian and producers,
The Nobel Prize nomination discussions and suggestions are wonderful...please consider a similar segment for the Peace Prize; I'm very curious on the thoughts of my fellow listeners.

Hi Brian

Rudyard Kipling wrote The Jungle Book. I think you said The Jungle.

I nominate the late playwright, Jerry Sterner, for his only successful play, Other Peoples Money. Exerpt: Jorgenson to stockholders: "God save us if you vote to take his paltry few dollars and run! God save this country if "that"
(pointing to the Arbitrage guy from Wall St.) ..is truly the wave of the future. We will then have become a country that makes nothing but hamburgers, creates nothing but lawyers, and sells nothing but tax shelters... Damn it, a business is more than the price of its stock. Its a place where we make our living, meet our friends, dream our dreams. It is in every sense, the very fabric that binds our society together."
Sterner totally writes about what we did become and he gets my Nobel prize for that.

The following writers/composer are among my favorites: Carlos Fuentes(overdue)...Athol Fugard...Philip Roth...Chinua Achebe(overdue)...Bob Dylan...Salman Rushdie (seriously overdue)...Barbara Kingsolver...Thomas Pynchon...Ben Okri...Russell Banks(probably overdue)...Bob Marley(posthumously)

Philip Roth from "The Counterlife":
While driving home, Henry remembered that, after the lecture, Nathan had been asked if he wrote "in quest of immortality." "If you're from New Jersey and you write thirty books and you win a Nobel Prize, and you live to be white-haired and ninety-five, it's highly unlikely but not impossible that after your death they'll decide to name a rest stop for you on the New Jersey Turnpike. And so, long after you're gone, you may indeed be remembered, but mostly by small children, in the backs of cars, when they tell their parents, "Stop, please, stop at Zuckerman's - I have to pee. For a New Jersey novelist that's as much immortality as it's realistic to hope for."

Dan Simmons: Hyperion and Fall or Hyperion. These stories are so well done and so multifaceted just in their references to past literature, analysis of the rise of the church after the fall of the roman empire. All this is almost subconcsiously embedded in a science fiction storyline that that is so complex and far seeing that your perspective on life is permanently changed after reading it. Combine this with an analysis of the human spirit, and conjecture on the evolution of god and our place in the universe in a post-human world and you have the best book I have ever read or expect to.

barbara kingslover

Richard Russo for his great books focussing on the ordinary unfashionable man, the working man. He writes with clarity and empathy.
I don't include That Old Cape Magic however, his latest book - a failure - a departure that didn't work - a shallow effort.

South African dramatist Athol Fugard

or Korean poet Ko Un

Philip Roth

Maurice Sendak. His stories transcend children's literature topics with unbounded imagination, yet he hits the point home in just a few pages.... and he keeps the adults engaged while they repeatedly read it over and over and over until it is imprinted on their minds and is engulfed in their subconscous. POWERFUL!

Pat Conroy

Patti Smith

Thank you caller for Alice Munro - she is amazing!

Me.

(Wait, do I have to be published first?)

And... Sondheim says lyrics aren't poetry. Doesn't mean they can't be literature.

Jeffrey Eugenides!!

Sondheim. Exactingly erudite, always in service to the uncompromising exploration of the human condition. A giant.

Roald Dahl.

And if allowed to nominate someone posthumously, James Baldwin.

Leonard Cohen who has written books and poetry as well as so many beautiful songs recorded by himself and other artists all over the world.

Arundhati Roy.
Aside from fiction she writes many political essays. One of them "Confronting Empire" (in "War Talk") is so universal and up to date! She writes on p. 112:
"The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling - their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.
Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them"

Michael Pollan. This may not be the proper category (he also kind of straddles, abstractly speaking, Economic Sciences).. but he should win a Nobel Prize.

Syrian poet Adonis should definitely get it given the Arab Spring and all the turmoil in Syria.
They have been passing on him for too long!

Garrison Keiller - national treasure and master storyteller

Peter Carey

Her true ambition, the one she would not confess to him, was to build something Extraordinary and Fine from glass and cast iron. A conservatory, but not a conservatory. Glass laced with steel, spun like a spider web--the idea danced around the periphery of her vision, never long enough to be clear. When she attempted to make a sketch, it became diminished, wooden, inelegant. Sometimes, in her dreams, she felt she had discovered its form, but if she had, it was like an improperly fixed photograph which fades when exposed to daylight. She was wise enough, or foolish enough, to believe this did not matter, that the form would present itself to her in the end.”

The greatest living/dead African author Chinua Achebe. He should have won it a long time ago.

SALMAN RUSHDIE! finally!

Stephen Sondheim -- both on his own achievement and the last (?) representative of the Great Age of the American Musical Theater.

Gary Shteyngart's "Super Sad True Love Story."

One of my underlined sentences:
"We headed south, and when the trees ran out the park handed us over to the city."

Philip Roth, c'mon!

Cormac McCarthy...

For the Nobel, consider Ko Un, the great
Buddhist poet from Korea. A country that produces Hyundai cars and Samsung flat screens, phones and consumer home products also boasts one of the world's most profound literary voices, a poet of grace.