Every year for the past four years, my book club has run a pool to guess who will win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Every year for the past three years, I have won. Because there is no shortlist announced, we all get five author picks, and the winner gets a hat. It’s all in good fun – but we also take it seriously, because literature is too important to not care about who is getting canonised.
If you would like to participate – as I think you should – here are four tips from a champion, in advance of this year’s October 9 announcement. First: for the last seven years – since 2018, when the Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk won – they’ve been alternating between men and women. Korea’s Han Kang won last year, so this year’s winner will be a man.
Second, the Nobel is political, but it does not intervene in politics. Winners are often chosen because of their work’s social engagement (with feminism, post-colonialism, ecology), but the prize shies away from asserting itself on the pressing issues of the day. And they’re quite skittish: so no winners from Russian, Ukraine, in Arabic, or in Hebrew for at least the next few years.
Third, they like to move around geographically and linguistically, and they hate giving it to Americans. American literature simply doesn’t need the boost. The Americans that have won recently are not novelists: the poet Louise Glück won in 2020, following Bob Dylan’s controversial win in 2016. The last American to win before him was Toni Morrison in 1993 (and she was the first American-born winner since John Steinbeck in 1962!). They might follow the papacy’s lead this year, but don’t bet on it.
In fact, the best way to ensure that your favourite writer never wins the Nobel Prize is to start telling everyone they will. And God forbid the New York Times suggests it.
Most importantly: they will never, ever give it to the person everyone thinks they will. Such was the fate of Philip Roth, Vladimir Nabokov, Arthur Miller. Haruki Murakami, Karl Ove Knausgaard and Margaret Atwood are never going to win now, and a certain kind of online lit guy will spend the rest of his life saying this is Gerald Murnane’s year, and he will be wrong every time. In fact, the best way to ensure that your favourite writer never wins the Nobel Prize is to start telling everyone they will. And God forbid the New York Times suggests it.
A member of my book club (I won’t name names) checks out the betting odds to see who he should put on his ballot – and thus, he has never won. The Nobel committee is checking the odds too, and everyone in the top 10 is getting tossed into the bin. The committee’s insistence on giving it to an unexpected candidate is kind of twee, but it’s a nice way to keep the already-narrow world of literature from getting even narrower. When the Tanzanian-British novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah won in 2021, only a few scholars of post-colonial literature knew his name: when his new novel, Theft, was published this year, it was in the front window of every bookstore. Everybody would have read the new Murakami anyways.
That the writer has to be famous, but not too famous, keeps us all on our toes. So too does the requirement that they be alive: the Nobel is awarded for an author’s whole body of work, which means winners are generally elderly, but also means they often drop off too soon. (I’m convinced the committee is kicking themselves that they procrastinated on giving it to the Spanish writer Javier Marías, who died in 2022.)
There are so many authors out there who certainly deserve it that picking the winner has to be a gut feeling. I asked my fellow participant Olivia how she knew the Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse would win in 2023. Her answer was simple: “Aura.” That’s why I picked Han Kang last year, too. I saw her speak at the Literaturhaus a few months earlier to promote the German translation of Greek Lessons, and I said to myself: “Now that’s a Nobel Prize winner.”
This all is maybe a bit flippant about literature, but I have two arguments for treating the Nobel like this: first, although the prize has a huge economic and social impact, the whole practice of prize-giving is silly, so why not get silly with it? Second, why not enlist the spirit of competition into getting us to read more widely? I first read Annie Ernaux’s The Years after I picked her in 2021, and because I put the Rwandan-French novelist Scholastique Mukasonga’s name on my ballot every other year, I always read her books when they drop.
As for this year: I’m gonna guess the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh. There’s only been one Indian Nobel Laureate, the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, who won all the way back in 1913. Unless they’re saving room for Arundhati Roy in a few years (which they very well might be), the subcontinent is long overdue. And it’s not going to be Salman Rushdie (sorry!!). Ghosh writes both fiction and non-fiction, has won a bunch of other major prizes (but not too many), and his perspective on colonialism, the Opium Wars and their contemporary impact is just the kind of stuff that the committee loves. He’s outspoken about the BJP, but lives abroad so isn’t too muddled up in politics. He’d be perfect – but now that I’ve said it, he’s been taken off the list. My apologies to him and his family.
