Swedish lines: who will get the Nobel Prize in Literature
Intellectuals and intellectuals all over the world are looking forward to Thursday, October 9th: it is on this day that the name of the Nobel laureate in Literature will be announced. This award is not only the most prestigious, but also the most unpredictable. Although bookmakers publish their ratings annually, they are almost never directly correlated with the results. This is very likely to be the case now. Especially for Izvestia, Sergey Rubis, director of the fiction department at the AST publishing house, reflects on the intrigue in the 2025 Nobel Prize race.
Who won't get the bonus
So far, we can say with almost absolute certainty that this year's prize winner will be a man. Since 2018, the Nobel Committee has consistently alternated the gender of the winners, and last year the winner was the Korean writer Han Gang. At the same time, never in the entire history of the award have women become its laureates two years in a row.
Han Gang
If you look at geography, the prize has not been awarded to writers from South America for a long time, the last representative of this part of the world was the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa in 2010. This year, Cesar Aira from Argentina is among the possible winners.
However, the bookmakers do not believe in his success. Their main favorite with odds of 5 to 1 is a completely unknown Australian writer, poet and essayist Gerald Murnane, and he has been consistently present in the top for several years in a row.
Other favorites include the more well—known Amitav Ghosh, author of the books "Poppy Sea", "Smoky River", "Fiery Stream", "Glass Palace" and "Armory Island". His books touch on such important social topics as ecology and the consequences of colonization. Another favorite is the 2015 Booker Prize-winning star Laszlo Krasnohorkai. Krasnokhorkai, by the way, perfectly follows the line of "experimentation" of prose, his recent novel Herscht 07769 (not translated in Russia) is one continuous sentence with a length of 400 pages (and at the same time, oddly enough, this is one of the simplest works of the author to perceive).
Amitav Ghosh
Pulitzer Prize winner Cristina Rivera Garza from Mexico is also among the favorites, but as I said before, the committee will have to break its principles to win.
On the other hand, one should not forget that bookmakers' quotes do not always reflect the real mood within the Nobel Committee, and someone completely unexpected may well become the winner. So, last year, the award for "rich poetic prose that resists historical traumas" was given to the author of "Vegetarian" Han Gang, whose chances were estimated at 33/1. This year, the creator of The Handmaid's Tale, the great Margaret Atwood, has similar quotes.
A glitch like a miracle
Predicting the next winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature is a thankless task, since the Nobel Committee in its selection is guided not by circulation and fame, but by criteria such as courage, originality, and even some experimentation of texts. For example, in 2020, the prize went to the American poet Louise Gluck. According to the jury, she received the award "for her unique poetic voice, which makes individuality universal through strict beauty." Upon learning about the award, Louise Gluck herself was as surprised as the book industry and the public, and wrote: "My first thought was, 'I won't have any more friends,' because most of my friends are writers."
Louise Gluck
The Committee tries to draw attention to the work of not the most famous authors from all over the world, although it has repeatedly been accused of Eurocentrism. Over the past ten years, the "pop" candidates, so to speak, can be counted on the fingers of one hand — Kazuo Ishiguro and Bob Dylan. But they also serve rather as confirmation that sometimes the prize is awarded, so to speak, on the basis of merit.
And Murakami again
Perhaps this year the committee will decide again to award someone based on their combined merits, since the list of worthy authors is considerable. In addition to the same Atwood, one can name the famous recluse Thomas Pynchon (although he is unlikely to come to Stockholm for the presentation), the Chilean writer Isabel Allende and Salman Rushdie. The latter meets several important criteria: His work unites the traditions of Eastern and Western culture, he is quite an innovative and authoritative author, and his influence on modern literature cannot be overestimated. In addition, Rushdie deserves respect for the fact that he did not change his views and continued to write after an unsuccessful attempt on his life, as a result of which he was virtually blind in one eye and had to undergo a lengthy rehabilitation procedure. However, this may be perceived as a political step, and the committee seems to be trying to stay away from politics.
Haruki Murakami
And the popular Japanese writer Haruki Murakami regularly appears in the ratings of bookmakers, but personally it seems to me that the very fact of his appearance in these ratings is a kind of trick of bookmakers who need at least one name familiar to a wide audience.
The debates in Stockholm of the Nobel Committee, consisting of 18 members, are held behind closed doors. No information is being disclosed. Therefore, it is almost impossible to make accurate predictions about who can receive the award. The jury's documents will not be available to the general public until 50 years after the award ceremony. Many members of the jury will have already passed away by that time, and it will be impossible to provide any explanations about the decision-making process. So all that remains is to wait and see who gets 11 million crowns, which is about €967,000.
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