Leo Tolstoy never won the Nobel Prize in Literature, but in 1974 two sitting members of the Swedish Academy awarded it to themselves. This episode opens the black box of the world's most prestigious literary award, starting with Alfred Nobel's 1895 will, which left 94 percent of his fortune to establish five prizes and instructed that the literature award go to work in an idealistic direction, a phrase that has been reinterpreted by every generation since 1901.

We trace how that definition shifted from the conservative church-and-state idealism of Carl David af Wirsén, which excluded Tolstoy and Zola, to post-WWI humanism, 1930s accessibility, and modern human rights. The conversation walks through the annual gauntlet: roughly 220 nominations by February, a shortlist of five by May, a summer of reading, oath-sworn secret translators, the ru ...