Nobel winner Pablo Neruda was almost denied prize because of odes to Stalin

As well as revealing the full shortlist, newly opened archives show that the 1971 judging panel were concerned the Chilean winner’s politics were ‘incompatible with the purpose of the prize’

Pablo Neruda may have won the Nobel prize for literature in 1971, but newly opened archives in Stockholm reveal the judging panel’s concerns about the Chilean poet’s “communist tendencies”.

The list of writers in the running for the Nobel prize, and the deliberations of the secretive members of the judging panel at the Swedish Academy, are kept confidential for 50 years. But the newly opened archives show that, although 1971’s winner Neruda was praised by the prize-givers for “a poetry that with the action of an elemental force brings alive a continent’s destiny and dreams”, behind the scenes some members of the Swedish Academy were hesitant.