Can Xue, Haruki Murakami, Margaret Atwood, César Aira, Gerald Murnane and Thomas Pynchon are among the authors most likely to win this year’s Nobel prize in literature, according to bookies.
Chinese avant-garde author Can Xue, 71, is Ladbrokes’ favourite to win, with odds of 10/1. She was also the favourite to win last year’s prize, which was ultimately awarded to Norwegian writer Jon Fosse.
The recipient of the 2024 prize will be announced on Thursday at noon BST, and will receive 11m Swedish kronor (£811,780).
“This year’s Nobel prize race is still wide open, and while we’ve seen strong interest in Gerald Murnane and César Aira, it’s Can Xue who remains the most popular pick with punters, and continues to head the betting as a result,” said Alex Apati of Ladbrokes.
Can Xue, whose real name is Deng Xiaohua, has twice been longlisted for the international Booker prize with her novel Love in the New Millennium – translated by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen – and for her short story collection I Live in the Slums, translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping.
She was born in 1953 in Changsha, Hunan province. During the Cultural Revolution, her parents were forced into manual labour in the countryside. Her formal education finished with elementary school. If she is named Nobel laureate, she will be the 18th woman to win the prize, the third Chinese winner and only the second still resident in China after Mo Yan, who received it in 2012.
Following Can Xue with 14/1 odds is Japanese writer Murakami, who has written more than a dozen novels – including Norwegian Wood, Kafka on the Shore and 1Q84 – as well as short story collections and nonfiction.
Atwood and Pynchon are both assigned 16/1 odds. Atwood – the Canadian author of The Handmaid’s Tale and Booker-winning novels The Testaments and The Blind Assassin along with many other novels, poetry collections and works of non-fiction – has long been considered a contender for the prize. In 2017, Kazuo Ishiguro, who won that year, apologised to Atwood: “I genuinely thought she would win it very soon.”
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Also with 16/1 odds are Aira, Murnane and Ersi Sotiropoulos. Other authors listed by Ladbrokes include Anne Carson (20/1), Don DeLillo (25/1), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (25/1), Salman Rushdie (25/1), Karl Ove Knausgård (28/1) and Han Kang (33/1).
The Nobel prize in literature has been awarded 116 times since 1901. Alongside Fosse, recent laureates include Annie Ernaux, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Louise Glück, Peter Handke and Olga Tokarczuk.