The Nobel Prize in Literature
Here at BookPage, we are anxiously awaiting tomorrow’s announcement for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Book blogs are buzzing with predictions and odds. There’s a detailed post at The Book Bench, The New Yorker’s blog, that includes a link to U.K. bookmaker Ladbrokes’ Nobel Prize odds-generator.
Word on the street is that Amos Oz (Israeli author and political activist); Herta Müller (Romanian-born German novelist); and Americans Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon are in top contention – although who knows? Maybe it will go to a wild card (like Bob Dylan, whose odds are supposedly 25/1).
While you’re waiting for the announcement, check out this amusing webpage that details where certain Nobel Prize winners were when they got “The Magic Call” informing them of the big news.
Here, you can find some interesting Nobel Prize facts. A sample: From 1901 to 2008, there have been 36 female Nobel Laureates… and 757 men. The oldest Nobel Laureate was 90 (Leonid Hurwicz, for economics) The youngest was 25 (Lawrence Bragg, for Physics). Two Nobel Laureates have declined the Prize, including Jean-Paul Sartre, who won in 1964 for Literature.
Tomorrow at 1 p.m. Central European Time (that’s 6 a.m. in Nashville) there will be a live web cast of the announcement on the Nobel Prize website.
Any Book Case readers care to make a prediction?
I won’t make a prediction, but some of the (American) authors purported to be at the top of the pack are baffling to me. I realize every literary prize can wind up being a bit of a crapshoot, but still…
I think it will be a poet this year. Ok, I predict it will be a poet this year. Or some novel writer that also writes lyric poetry.
Hmm, I predicted wrong, but I was there when Englund made the announcement. Must make this a tradition.