Nobel odds or Who will be awarded the Nobel Literature Prize

[Werner Presber]

  Nobel odds

Just yesterday we mentioned that it was getting to be Nobel-guessing  
time, and lo and behold Ladbrokes have put up odds for this year's  
Nobel Prize for Literature.

  It is, pretty much, the usual list of suspects -- with the  
obligatory ancient and completely obscure Nordics thrown in (Willy  
Kyrklund, anyone ? (hey, he's 40/1) Eeva Kilpi ?) and the apparently  
now obligatory Bob Dylan (an afterthought at 500/1)). Noteworthy  
that, beside the excusable missing Umlauts they still manage to  
mangle quite a few names: who is going to place a bet on Thomas  
Transtromer, Antoni Tabucchi, or Umberto Ecco ? (And if, say, Umberto  
Eco wins, would they even have to pay out to those who bet on this  
Umberto Ecco ?) They also include one dead guy (Pramoedya Ananta Toer  
-- 40/1, despite being ineligible to win due to his deceased  
status..... ) (In fact, it looks like they just copied an early  
version of last year's list, where they also misspelled Tabucchi's  
name -- and included the already then dead Indonesian author .....)

  Anyway, the odds are likely to change as bets are placed, so here  
for reference the current odds of those they consider the leading  
contenders:
Claudio Magris 5/1
Les Murray 6/1
Philip Roth 7/1
Thomas Transtromer 7/1
Adonis 8/1
Amos Oz 10/1
Haruki Murakami 10/1
Hugo Claus 10/1
Joyce Carol Oates 10/1
Ko Un 10/1
Antoni Tabucchi 20/1
Cees Nooteboom 20/1
Margaret Atwood 20/1
Milan Kundera 20/1
Thomas Pynchon 20/1
        Other odds of note:
Don DeLillo 25/1
Carlos Fuentes 40/1
Harry Mulisch 40/1
Mario Vargas Llosa 50/1
A. B. Yehoshua 100/1
Salman Rushdie 100/1
        Magris seems way overrated here, but maybe that's just to  
fool you into thinking that, say, Atwood at 20/1 is a reasonable  
bet .....
        We're not sure where we'd put our money if we were betting  
folk; spreading it over Murray/Mulisch/Yehoshua (at these odds) would  
be our first gut instinct.

text via „the Literary Saloon“. read also „Who Want to Wet on Thomas  
Pynchon“
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