Nobel Prize for Literature: Cărtărescu, once again, the bettors' favorite

The Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu is also this year among the favorites to win the Nobel Prize for literature. The verdict for the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced today, after lunch. The names of potential winners have already started to circulate, but naturally the Royal Swedish Academy has remained silent, leaving only the punters to juggle the speculation. Among the most prominent candidates are the Chinese writer Can Xue, the Australian authors Gerald Murnane and Alexis Wright, and the Romanian Mircea Cărtărescu. The Russian dissident Liudmila Ulitskaia and the American from Antigua, Jamaica Kincaid, are also in the competition. Other outsiders are the Korean poet Ko Un, aged 91, the Canadians Anne Carson and Margaret Atwood, but also the prolific Joyce Carol Oates. Other estimates refer to the Argentinian Cesar Aira and the Hungarian Laszlo Krasznahorkai, the author of the novel "Satan's Tango" and winner of the International Booker Prize in 2015. Regarding the presence at the bottom of the ranking of Houellebecq, Pierre Michon, Thomas Pynchon, who hasn't published anything since 2013, and even the singer Paul Simon (composer of the song "The Sound of Silence"), it would seem that they are not there to impress the public, but only to be in numbers. Journalist Thierry Clermont of Le Figaro wonders if the Nobel jurors will have the courage and the audacity to finally award their prize (worth 11 million Swedish kroner, that's about 923,000,000 euros) to Salman Rushdie, the tireless fighter for freedom, author of fifteen novels, after neglecting Borges, Nabokov, Philip Roth, Ismaïl Kadare, Kundera, Jorge Amado and Yves Bonnefoy. It should be remembered that in 2016, no one bet on Bob Dylan winning, as happened with Patrick Modiano, who took the award in 2014.