Nobel prize for literature to be awarded on Thursday

The winner of this year’s Nobel prize for literature will be announced on Thursday, the Swedish Academy has revealed.

The name of the 112th literature laureate – the writer who is deemed by the members of the Swedish Academy to have best fulfilled Alfred Nobel’s will’s stipulation to have produced “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction” – will be unveiled at 1pm local time in Stockholm.

With a world of authors to choose from, it is notoriously difficult to predict the winner, though the favourite to take the prize at betting firms Ladbrokes and Paddy Power is the Belarusian author and journalist Svetlana Alexievich, with Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Americans Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates making their habitually strong showing. Irish Booker winner John Banville is also tipped.

Thursday’s winner will join a line-up of international literary icons who range from Alexandr Solzhenitsyn to Albert Camus and Gabriel García Márquez, and, more recently, Toni Morrison and Doris Lessing. Just as many have been overlooked: Leo Tolstoy, Henry James and Henrik Ibsen are among those who never won a Nobel.

Last year’s winner, Patrick Modiano, was little-known in the anglophone world before his win, which has inspired a flurry of new editions. The latest is his 1992 novel, Un Cirque Passe, translated as After the Circus. It comes out in the US this month and in the UK in January.

Each year, around 600-700 individuals and organisations are invited to nominate potential candidates for the award. The list of around 200 is whittled down by the Nobel Committee, with the shorter list then deliberated over by the Swedish Academy, a group of 18 writers and scholars.

A majority vote decides the winner. “It is not difficult to find worthy candidates. There are many: the world is so big … The hard part is to select who will get it,” former permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Peter Englund writes on the Nobel site. “I’ve never experienced a prize where everyone was in full agreement. If so, it would be really strange.”

At Ladbrokes, Alex Donohue said that two “dark horses” had emerged this year: Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, winner of the Man Booker International award, whose odds had shot from 50/1 to 25/1, and Korean poet Ko Un, whose odds shifted from 40/1 to 20/1. “Unusually this year the favourites have been ignored and literary speculators believe we’ll see the winner come from out of leftfield,” he said.