Bookies’ favourites include Canadian poet Anne Carson, Chinese experimental writer Can Xue and Japanese writer Haruki Murakami
Is Can Xue becoming the new Haruki Murakami? The Japanese literary superstar has for so long been a favourite to win a Nobel without actually winning one that people in the literature industry have started to talk of the “Murakami curse”. But Chinese experimental writer Can Xue too is starting to follow that pattern. A bookies’ top favourite in 2018, 2019, 2023, 2024 and 2025, she’s again topping runners and riders lists this year.
Could the pre-announcement hype in itself count against her winning? The Swedish Academy is clearly a self-aware kind of oracle, unhappy to see its choices as determined by outside forces. Last year’s laureate László Krasznahorkai may have been Ladbrokes’ favourite (alongside Can Xue), but bookies correctly predicting the winner is a once-in-a-decade occurrence. The last time it happened before that was with Svetlana Alexievich in 2015, Ladbrokes’ clear favourite at 3/1 odds.
Yet while the Academy certainly likes being seen as unpredictable, that’s not to say that it actually is. The biggest literary accolade in the world is evidently engaged in a constant process of re-adjusting the perceived imbalances in its list of laureates. Over the last two decades it has done so in terms of gender, with eight women and 12 men, alternating since 2017, and in terms of crude geography, with 10 winners from western Europe and 10 from the rest of the world.
After a Norwegian man in 2023, a South Korean woman in 2024 and a Hungarian man in 2025, we might reasonably expect a non-European woman in 2026. Hence strong odds for Can Xue and Anne Carson, and rumours about Australian memoirist and novelist Alexis Wright and Antiguan-American novelist and gardening writer Jamaica Kincaid. But non-European female is still a very broad category, which is why Nobel-watchers have been considering other patterns.
The last Nobel literature laureate known foremost for their poetry was Louise Glück in 2020. Before that, it was Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer in 2011. High time for another writer of verse, which is why one name bandied about at the Frankfurt Book Fair this week was that of South African poet Marlene van Niekerk.
But what if the crucial metric is not literary form but accessibility? The last winners with a genuine populist appeal – writers who didn’t need a Nobel – were Bob Dylan and Kazuo Ishiguro, in 2016 and 2017 respectively. “In a way, it would be logical if this year they wanted someone who was a little more well-known and accessible after Krasznahorkai”, wrote Swedish broadsheet Svenska Dagbladet this week.
Jens Liljestrand, a critic for Expressen who predicted Han Kang’s win in 2024, has followed that line of thought and come up with an intriguing prediction: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Nigerian author of the phenomenally successful Half of a Yellow Sun.
By that logic, of course, the Academy might have spent the last decade playing one big game of double bluff and working towards handing the prize to Haruki Murakami after all.