Our Literature desk have come up with some opening odds on this year's Nobel prize. Margaret Atwood is 6/1. https://t.co/cNZEoerevz pic.twitter.com/dCf8ccd2Ub
— Ladbrokes Politics (@LadPolitics) September 7, 2017
Ladbrokes betting odds for this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature—like the list of all the Nobel winners since 1901—is more significant for what it leaves out than what it includes. Many of the greatest authors never won the prize. The recent winners, the Austrian Communist Herta Müller and the Belarusian interviewer Svetlana Alexievich were notably poor choices.
Kazuo Ishiguro—a Japanese-born Englishman and pupil of Malcolm Bradbury at the University of East Anglia–deserves the prize but wasn’t even mentioned by Ladbrokes as a possible candidate. Like the previous winners Wole Soyinka and J. M. Coetzee, English was not Ishiguro’s native language. The same was true of Conrad and Nabokov, who had an engaging idiosyncratic style and should have won the prize. The Japanese bookstores filled their shelves with the works of the hot-tipped Haruki Murakami (5/1 odds), then quickly cleared them and restocked the space with Ishiguro’s books.
Many writers have won for political as well as literary reasons. The novelist Ismail Kadare, who defied the Communist regime in Albania, and Adunis, the Syrian poet who opposed Assad’s regime, deserve better odds. Salman Rushdie suffered self-inflicted persecution, but is unpopular and unclubable among the English literati. James Ngugi—who, like William Least Heat Moon, gained fame by changing his name to the more ethnic Ngugi Wa Thiongo—was touted as the potential winner (4/1). He may eventually win because the politically correct Nobel Committee is always keen to reward a black writer.
It was absurd to give the same long (25/1) odds to Joyce Carol Oates and to Philip Roth, who’s an infinitely better writer. He certainly deserves the prize but couldn’t win because the American songwriter Bob Dylan absurdly won it last year. For the same reason Margaret Atwood (6/1) couldn’t get the prize soon after another Canadian woman, Alice Munro. It was weirdly unfair to mention Julian Barnes, but not his superior countrymen Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. Paul Theroux and Tom McGuane, and the Italian Elsa Ferrante, should also have been serious contenders. Major Asian countries such as Pakistan, South Korea, Indonesia and the Philippines have never won the prize, so watch out for promising writers from those eager-to-win nations.
Jeffrey Meyers’ memoir with biographical chapters, Resurrections: Authors, Heroes—and a Spy will appear with the University of Virginia Press next year.