Bookplanet: Leonard Cohen deserves Nobel Prize

'Paul Kennedy has a message for the Nobel Committee in Stockholm: Leonard Cohen's your man. This Saturday, radio documentarian Kennedy will launch a campaign to nominate the revered Canadian songwriter and poet for the Nobel Prize in Literature. During a panel discussion at Blue Metropolis, Montreal's international literary festival, the host of CBC Radio's Ideas will make the case that Cohen is worthy of the $1.7-million prize, backed up by writer George Elliott Clarke, playwright and poet Michel Garneau, college professor Edward Palumbo and jazz singer Karen Young. "There are a lot of people in Montreal who are very passionate about Leonard Cohen ... He's different from a celebrity; he's almost God." Though he is not a member of the Swedish Academy or any of the other bodies that can put forward names for the Nobel, Kennedy hopes he can build some Nobel momentum for the Montreal-born songwriter, poet and novelist. "He deserves to be recognized for the influence he's had on poets and novelists and musicians and songwriters and playwrights and, God knows, anyone who works in language," argues Kennedy, who first got hooked on Cohen's sensibility when his Grade 9 English teacher played Suzanne in class.' More here. Via Maud Newton.