Who Will Win the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature? part 2

 

Famous, Famous-ish, and Not-at-All Famous Non-American Writers Who Are Not Going to Win

• Haruki Murakami (Japanese novelist and jogger; 4/1 odds)
• John Banville (Irish novelist; 20/1 odds)
• Milan Kundera (Czech novelist and playwright; 50/1 odds)
• William Trevor (Irish novelist, short story writer, and playwright; 66/1 odds)
• Rohinton Mistry (Indo-Canadian novelist and short story writer; 66/1 odds)
• Margaret Atwood (Canadian novelist, poet, and essayist; 66/1 odds)
• Paul Muldoon (Irish poet; 66/1 odds)
• Salman Rushdie (Indo-British novelist, short story writer, and Facebook user; 66/1 odds)
• Tom Stoppard (English playwright and screenwriter; 66/1 odds)
• Colm Toibin (Irish novelist, short story writer, and essayist; 66/1 odds)
• Julian Barnes (English novelist and essayist; 66/1 odds)
• Don Paterson (Scottish poet; 100/1 odds)
• A. S. Byatt (English novelist; 100/1 odds)
• James Kelman (Scottish novelist, short story writer, playwright, and essayist; 100/1 odds)
• Hilary Mantel (English novelist and short story writer; 100/1 odds)

Mostly these are famous writers who people have bet on because they’re famous. Some have strong claims to being Nobel-ish, but there’s always a “but.” Trevor is interesting, but he’s too similar to Alice Munro, who won in 2013. Stoppard would be great, but he wrote Shakespeare in Love. Atwood would be cool, but there’s Munro again, which means a Canadian isn’t going to win for a long, long time. Kundera seems like a Nobel contender in a lot of ways, but he isn’t even the best Czech writer of his generation (that’d be Ivan Klima) and he hasn’t done good work in a long, long time. Don Paterson clearly bet on himself to win, which is something I would advise marginal English language writers to do. And then there’s Murakami, who always leads the betting and has a credible claim to being our Dickens—an internationally popular, accessible, and often brilliant writer. But Murakami is not going to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
 
One other interesting thing to note: Last year, the popular British novelists in contention, aka Chris Hitchens’s Former Designated Drivers, were Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan; this year, Julian Barnes seems to have wrestled the keys away from McEwan, or perhaps McEwan’s Look Who’s Talking novelization was seen as being not Nobel material. (...)


Maybe, Just Maybe, This Year... Or Next Year.... Or, More Accurately, in Five Years

• Ismail Kadare (Albanian novelist and poet; 16/1 odds)
• Javier Marías (Spanish novelist, short story writer, essayist, and translator; 16/1 odds)
• László Krasznahorkai (Hungarian novelist and screenwriter; 20/1 odds)
• Cesar Aira (Argentine novelist, short story writer, and essayist; 20/1 odds)
• Peter Handke (Austrian novelist and playwright; 25/1 odds)
• Péter Nádas (Hungarian novelist, playwright, and essayist; 25/1 odds)
• Amos Oz (Israeli novelist; 25/1 odds)
• Adam Zagajewski (Polish poet and essayist; 33/1 odds)
• Enrique Vila-Matas (Spanish novelist; 66/1 odds)

By Alex Shephard

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articolul integral la sursa: newrepublic.com