Nobel Prize

[Richard Romeo]

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) - This year's Nobel Prize in literature will be 
announced Thursday,
weeks earlier than most years, and only the Swedish Academy knows which 
world author will be
crowned.

Americans John Updike, Thomas Pynchon , Philip Roth, and Joyce Carol Oates 
as well as Mario
Vargas Llosa of Peru, Mexico's Carlos Fuentes, Guenter Grass of Germany and 
Belgian Hugo
Claus, have all been mentioned as possible winners.

The academy revealed the announcement date on Tuesday. Custom dictates that 
the prize date be
announced just days in advance. In a break from tradition, the newest Nobel 
laureate will be named
on the last day of September. Usually, the literature award is announced on 
a Thursday in October.

Some are looking to the slightly earlier-than-usual announcement as a 
possible clue to the recipient.

"It can mean that it was an easy choice, in which case it's a storyteller," 
said Thomas Steinfeld of the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung's literary section. "And after all the 
Europeans the past years, I think
it will be an American."

Steinfeld said he's rooting for Updike, whose four books about ex-basketball 
player Harry "Rabbit"
Angstrom chronicle American life of the past half-century.

New York author Cynthia Ozick, who as a member of the American Academy of 
Arts and Letters
has the right to suggest recipients, said either Pynchon or Roth would be a 
worthy recipient.

"They are astonishments of the kind that don't come in every generation," 
she said.

Then there's Salman Rushdie, the Booker Prize winner who lived under a death 
threat after his book
"The Satanic Verses" was accused of blaspheming Islam. Ayatollah Ruhollah 
Khomeini issued the
fatwa, or religious edict, on Rushdie in 1989. The threat is now at least 
partly lifted.

"The Swedish Academy has something to repair there," Steinfeld said.

Secrecy has surrounded this year's selection, just as it has since the 
academy began making its
choices in 1901. The awards are funded by a trust set up in the will of 
Swedish industrialist Alfred
Nobel, the inventor of dynamite.

The academy, founded in 1786, has 18 members, though one chair is vacant and 
three members
don't participate. Academy members, former recipients and a select group of 
literature and language
professors and specialists in the field may suggest candidates.

Nobel Prize winners receive their prizes, this year worth $960,000, on Dec. 
10.

Jose Saramago of Portugal won last year's Nobel Prize in literature.

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