Awards season is here

Literary awards season is upon us, and I thought you’d find a roundup of the announcement dates useful.

Anyone getting up early tomorrow to watch a webcast of the Nobel Prize announcement?

• The Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced on October 7 at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. The announcement is at 1 p.m. CET in Stockholm (6 a.m. in Nashville), and there will be a live webcast here. Any predictions? Rumor has it that Cormac McCarthy, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Haruki Murakami are favored. (An American hasn’t won since Toni Morrison in 1993.) [ETA: winner was Mario Vargas Llosa; click here for our take.]

• The winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction will be revealed on October 12 in London. The winner will be one of the following novels: Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey; Room by Emma Donoghue; In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut; The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson; The Long Song by Andrea Levy; or C by Tom McCarthy. I read Room over the weekend and am definitely rooting for Donoghue!

• On October 13, Pat Conroy will announce the National Book Award finalists in Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry and Young People’s Literature. The announcement will take place at Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home in Savannah, Georgia. The winner will be announced on November 17. (Every year, the 20 finalists are named at a symbolic location.) The finalists will be books that were published between December 1, 2009 and November 30, 2010.

The National Book Critics Circle Awards will be announced in March, the Pulitzers in April and the Orange Prize in June—so after this fall burst we’ll have a while to wait. Are there any other awards you look forward to every year?

You can start getting excited for BookPage’s “Best of 2010″ lists—coming in December!