Since the success of his bestseller novel The Dinner in 2009, Dutch literary writer Herman Koch has been branded as ‘the most successful writer of the Netherlands’. In his media coverage, we encounter a narrative about his career that has all the characteristics of the ‘success myth’ of the contemporary celebrity. What can the construction of Koch’s success myth tell us about the norms that actors and institutions of the public media use when they talk about literature? How do Koch and his critics deal with the tension between different ways of contributing value in the literary field? And does Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptualization of the ‘economic world reversed’ still suffice to describe the distribution of capital in today’s literary fields?