STOCKHOLM — Can Xue, the Chinese avant-garde novelist whose experimental fiction has made her a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, has emerged as the bookmakers’ favorite to win this year’s award, according to odds offered by the British betting company Ladbrokes.
Can Xue is listed at 10/1, ahead of the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami at 14/1. Australian writer Gerald Murnane and the American novelist Thomas Pynchon are among the other writers near the top of the market.
The Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced on Thursday, Oct. 8. The winner will receive 12 million Swedish kronor, or roughly $1.2 million.
Among the other prominent writers appearing in Ladbrokes’ betting market are Mexican novelist Cristina Rivera Garza, Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas, Russian novelist Ludmila Ulitskaya, Canadian writer Margaret Atwood and French novelist Michel Houellebecq.
The betting market also includes several prominent writers from South Asia. Salman Rushdie, the Indian-born British-American novelist and author of Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, was listed at 25/1 in a Ladbrokes list published last week, while Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh was further down the field at 50/1.
Canadian poet and classicist Anne Carson was listed at 33/1 in the same Ladbrokes odds.
The odds, however, are not predictions from the Swedish Academy and offer no insight into its deliberations. Nobel nominations and discussions are conducted in secrecy, and bookmakers’ favorites have frequently failed to win.
Murakami, for example, has appeared near the top of Nobel betting markets for years without receiving the prize. Can Xue has similarly been regarded as a leading contender for several years.
Last year, the prize went to Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai, who had been offered at relatively short odds of 6/1 shortly before the announcement.
This year’s market remains unusually open: no writer is priced as strongly as Krasznahorkai was before last year’s award. That leaves Can Xue at the head of a field in which even the bookmakers appear reluctant to claim a clear favorite.
