Last year’s Nobel Prize in Literature was something of a rarity in the award’s history in that the winner, Svetlana Alexievich, was favored to win by the British betting site Ladbrokes. Why bettors zeroed in on Alexievich remains a bit of a mystery, given that the Nobel tilts heavily toward fiction and Alexievich’s books are oral histories that combine fiction and non-fiction. In all likelihood, someone got their hands on the prize’s top-secret shortlist and bet big on Alexievich.

If Ladbrokes is to be trusted, the field this year is wide open. But it shouldn’t be trusted, not really, since so far people are betting on the same writers that they always bet on to win the Nobel Prize, most of whom don’t even have a chance. Pasta fetishist Haruki Murakami will not win the Nobel Prize. Bad tweeter Joyce Carol Oates will not win the Nobel Prize. The situation in Syria is so depressing that even the Nobel Committee for Literature, which loves to celebrate its own wokeness, won’t touch it with a ten-foot pole, which means that the poet and perennial Nobel bridesmaid Adonis also probably will not win it. Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o might have a shot, but the point is this: Murakami, Oates, Adonis, and Ngugi have led the Ladbrokes field for years not because they are contenders necessarily, but because people bet on them.

Why, then, do we always turn to Ladbrokes? Unlike the Man Booker or the National Book Award, the Nobel Prize releases no longlists or shortlists. Unlike political news, the information doesn’t leak ahead of time—whatever else you can say about the Nobel Committee, they run a pretty tight Scandanavian ship. But that means that Nobel speculation rests entirely on bookies, and the bookies are not particularly confident in their ability to set the bets. The Nobel Prize may be the Super Bowl of literary prizes, but it’s much harder to predict than the Super Bowl because seemingly anyone who has written a book could win it.





Last year, a Ladbrokes representative emailed me to explain, “We are very modest about our abilities to forecast events such as this, so we tend to let the market (i.e. our customer’s money) be the guide as to where the odds should be.” So the real reason the odds are so messed up—the reason someone who should delete their Twitter account is a perennial “frontrunner”—is because people tend to bet on popular international writers who seem Nobel-worthy or on those have been at the top of the Ladbrokes pile for years.

So let’s dispel with this fiction that the betting odds for the Nobel Prize in Literature actually mean anything. They don’t, with the exception that if someone shoots up in the odds, like Alexievich did last year, there’s a pretty good chance that they’re on the shortlist. With that in mind, I’ve reseeded the Ladbrokes pool into contenders and pretenders, one of whom may be announced the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature on October 13.