A perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Adonis has been regularly nominated for the award since 1988.[1] After winning Germany's major award the Goethe Prize in 2011, he emerged as a front runner to be awarded the Nobel Prize,[56] but it was instead awarded to the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, with Peter Englund, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, commenting that there is no political dimension to the prize, and describing such a notion as "literature for dummies".[57]