September 26, 2022, 11:42am
Do you enjoy gambling—but, you know, in a cultured way? None of that racetrack nonsense or three card monte for you? Well you’re in luck: the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced next Thursday, October 6, and the bookies have begun taking bets. (You know literary prize season has truly begun when the Lit Hub editors start lurking on online betting sites.)
I consulted NicerOdds to get a sense of which writers are the favorites to take home the highest of all literary prizes this year. The list has some surprises (very fun to see Garielle Lutz with such good odds!) and plenty of old standbys (one day, Murakami, one day). But before you put any money down, be warned that the bookies are predictably wrong on the Nobel. Case in point: last year, the winner, Abdulrazak Gurnah, wasn’t even on the list. In 2020, winner Louise Glück only enjoyed 25/1 odds, and the 2018/2019 winners, which were announced jointly in 2019, were only a little closer to the top: Olga Tokarczuk had 10/1 odds and Peter Handke had 20/1. Your money is never safe with the Nobel.
Still, it’s fun. So without any further ado, the bookies’ odds for the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature as of this writing are:
Michel Houellebecq – 7/1
Salman Rushdie – 8/1
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o – 10/1
Stephen King — 10/1
Annie Ernaux — 12/1
Garielle Lutz — 12/1
Pierre Michon — 12/1
Robert Coover — 12/1
Haruki Murakami — 14/1
Anne Carson — 16/1
Hélène Cixous — 16/1
Jamaica Kincaid — 16/1
Jon Fosse — 16/1
Lyudmila Ulitskaya — 16/1
Margaret Atwood — 16/1
Maryse Condé — 16/1
Mircea Cartarescu — 16/1
Péter Nádas — 16/1
Ryszard Krynicki — 16/1
Don DeLillo — 20/1
Dubravka Ugrešic — 20/1
Javier Marías — 20/1
Mia Couto — 20/1
Nuruddin Farah — 20/1
Can Xue — 25/1
Edna O’Brien — 25/1
Gerald Murnane — 25/1
Homero Aridjis — 25/1
Ivan Vladislavic — 25/1
Karl Ove Knausgård — 25/1
Scholastique Mukasonga — 25/1
Yan Lianke — 25/1
Botho Strauss — 33/1
Charles Simic — 33/1
Cormac McCarthy — 33/1
Hilary Mantel — 33/1
Ko Un — 33/1
Linton Kwesi Johnson — 33/1
Marilynne Robinson — 33/1
Xi Xi — 33/1
Yu Hua — 33/1
Zoe Wicomb — 33/1
Martin Amis — 50/1
Milan Kundera — 50/1