Nobel odds or Who will be awarded the Nobel Literature Prize

[Richard Ryan]

I'd spread my bucks on Rushdie, Murakami, and Roth.

The Joyce Carol Oates line must be a joke the
Ladbrokes guys threw in.  To have JCO at 10-1 and not
have Norman Mailer, John Ashbery or W.S Merwin on the
list at all defies all sense and reason.

 
--- Werner Presber <wernerpresber at yahoo.de> wrote:

>   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“