The winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature will be announced today by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. This year the prize is worth eleven million Swedish crowns (930 thousand euros), one million more than last year, when this most prestigious prize in the literary world went to Frenchwoman Annie Ernaux. The prize is traditionally awarded on December 10, the anniversary of founder Alfred Nobel’s death.
The bookmakers’ favorite is a 70-year-old Chinese woman who writes under the pseudonym Can Xue. Norwegian Jon Fosse, popular Japanese Haruki Murakami and Australian Gerald Murnane also have a chance.
For years, the Canadian poet Anne Carson, the Russian writer and Putin critic Lyudmila Ulitzkaja, the Romanian Mircea Cartarescu, who publishes in the Austrian Zsolnay Verlag, and the East African Ngugi wa Thiong’o were also considered potential candidates for the Nobel Prize.