Nobel Prize in Literature 2025 Highlights: László Krasznahorkai, Hungary’s master of the apocalypse, is winner

Many of Krasznahorkai’s books made the leap to film thanks to legendary director Béla Tarr. Their collaborations—like Satantango, Werckmeister Harmonies, and The Turin Horse—turned long, slow takes into cinematic poetry. The pair’s partnership helped cement Krasznahorkai’s reputation as one of Europe’s most visionary writers.

Born in 1954 in Gyula, Hungary, Krasznahorkai burst onto the literary scene with Satantango in 1985—a haunting portrait of life after the fall of communism. Susan Sontag once called him “the Hungarian master of the apocalypse,” and for good reason: his worlds are surreal, chaotic, and strangely transcendent.

Here’s what Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister of Hungary had to say.

The 2025 Nobel Literature Prize for László Krasznahorkai, would for many of his readers have felt like the completion of a sentence decades in the making. A long, meandering sentence that has finally reaching its destination. For them, the award recognised not just a distinctive prose style but a radical conviction: that art can hold the world’s chaos together, if only by the thread of a comma.

The Hungarian novelist is raised by Susan Sontag as “the Hungarian master of the apocalypse” and by W.G. Sebald as a writer whose universality “rivals Gogol’s Dead Souls”. His tone drifts between cosmic comedy and desolation, and his vision of humanity is forever poised on the brink of collapse.

Bookmakers’ odds rarely get right the Academy’s decision, but they capture the literary world’s hopes and biases. This year, Hungary’s László Krasznahorkai (6/1) was second on Bookies lists, while Australian writer Gerald Murnane lead the betting at 5/1

Here are some of László Krasznahorkai's most famous works:

1. Krasznahorkai’s first novel Sátántangó, published in 1985 (Satantango, 2012), was a literary sensation in Hungary.

2. His second book, Az ellenállás melankóliája (The Melancholy of Resistance, 1998) was horror fantasy. It prompted Susan Sontag to call him ‘master of the apocalypse’

3. His novel Háború és háború (1999; War & War, 2006) Krasznahorkai shifts attention to beyond the borders of his Hungarian homeland

4. His most famous work Báró Wenckheim hazatér (Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming, 2019), Dostoyevsky’s idiot is reincarnated in the hopelessly infatuated baron with his gambling addiction

5. His fifth novel an Herscht 07769: Florian Herscht Bachregénye (Herscht 07769: A Novel, 2024) too was apocalypse epic set in Germany

"This year’s Nobel Prize laureate in literature László Krasznahorkai is a great epic writer in the Central European tradition that extends through Kafka to Thomas Bernhard, and is characterised by absurdism and grotesque excess."

He is the first Hungarian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature since Imre Kertész in 2002, joining an illustrious lineage that includes Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison and Kazuo Ishiguro.

László Krasznahorkai won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literaturefor "his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2025 has been awarded to László Krasznahorkai, the Hungarian novelist and screenwriter celebrated for his dense, apocalyptic prose and philosophical depth. Often called the “writer of the apocalypse”, Krasznahorkai’s work captures humanity on the brink — of collapse, transcendence, and revelation.

From Satantango to The Melancholy of Resistance and Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, his fiction unfolds in long, hypnotic sentences that mimic chaos itself, spiralling through despair, faith, and absurdity. His worlds crumble, yet within ruin, he finds beauty and endurance.

The atmosphere on the Nobel livestream is nothing short of electric — it’s the biggest literary guessing game of the year, and the chat is alive.

Supporters of Haruki Murakami are filling the feed with hopeful messages, while Amitav Ghosh’s fans are chiming in with patriotic pride, calling for a second Indian win after Tagore.

Meanwhile, others are backing Gerald Murnane and László Krasznahorkai, citing their quiet brilliance and boundary-pushing prose. Others are rooting for dark horses like Cristina Rivera Garza and Can Xue, reminding everyone that the Nobel committee loves an unexpected twist.

With just seconds to go before the Swedish Academy steps up to the podium in Stockholm, one thing is clear — this year’s anticipation feels global, heartfelt, and gloriously unpredictable.

Here we go! It is finally happening! The literary world is holding its breath as the Swedish Academy prepares to step up to the podium in Stockholm. In just a few minutes, the curtain will lift on one of the most anticipated cultural moments of the year: the announcement of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Will it be Gerald Murnane, the reclusive Australian whose meditative prose has captivated readers? Or perhaps László Krasznahorkai, the Hungarian master of long sentences and existential despair? Could it even be Amitav Ghosh, ending India’s 112-year wait since Tagore’s win?

As the countdown to the Nobel Prize in Literature enters its final hour, author-politician Shashi Tharoor has his mind made up. His pick? Salman Rushdie, the writer who, in Tharoor’s words, “expanded the boundaries of the possible in Indian fiction.”

Tharoor’s admiration for Rushdie “comes from a shared faith in the transformative potential of Indian English fiction.” Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) “redefined postcolonial literature — a book that turned Indian history into magical realism’s grand theatre.”

For Tharoor, Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) remains the definitive novel of postcolonial India — a literary Big Bang that fused history, myth, and modernity. “His was a breakthrough voice that deserves recognition,” Tharoor says, adding that Rushdie’s bold experiments in form and politics reshaped Indian English fiction for generations.

It’s a fitting endorsement from a man who himself straddles diplomacy and storytelling. Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel reimagined the Mahabharata as a satire on modern India, setting the tone for a new kind of mythic realism. Could 2025 finally be the year Rushdie takes the Nobel? The world — and Tharoor — are watching.

(As told to Anushree KC)

Today the world will find out who this year's literature laureate is.

Who do you think will be awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature?

Stay tuned - we'll be breaking the news soon.

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For Kerala-born writer Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari, the 2025 Nobel should go to one of America’s most elusive geniuses — Don DeLillo.

For Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari, the prize belongs to American novelist and short story writer Don DeLillo, though he admits that American writer Thomas Pynchon comes close.

“I wish Don DeLillo good luck even though I think Thomas Pynchon is an equally deserving candidate,” he says. “Much as I admire his early works like Running Dog and End Zone, in my opinion what makes Don DeLillo an easy choice for any award out there is his genius phase, which lasted from 1985 to 1997, beginning with White Noise and culminating in his spectacular Underworld, a sprawling novel which loosely follows the fate of a baseball lost in Cold War America.”

“His information-rich, detail-prone, meditative prose is without parallel and in his themes he was a visionary spokesperson for our age on the edge of doom.”

“So yes, my vote is for Don. It’s already late and I hope the Nobel Committee makes the right decision.”

(As told to Anushree KC)

As we count down the final minutes to this year’s Nobel announcement, last year’s winner Han Kang still lingers in the conversation, the writer who showed the world that resistance can be silent and deeply human.

Her 2024 win for “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life” cemented her as one of the most empathetic voices of our time. From The Vegetarian’s haunting exploration of a woman’s revolt against violence to Human Acts’ tender reckoning with South Korea’s Gwangju Massacre, Han writes where pain meets grace.

Each book is an act of remembrance — for the dead, for the silenced, for the parts of us we’d rather not face. In her hands, loss becomes language. As the world waits for a new laureate, Han’s work reminds us that literature’s truest gift is empathy.

The countdown is officially on. With one hour left before the Swedish Academy reveals this year’s Nobel laureate in literature, the betting tables are flickering.

At the top sits reclusive Australian visionary Gerald Murnane (6.00), chased closely by Hungary’s apocalyptic stylist László Krasznahorkai (7.00) and Mexico’s shape-shifting storyteller Cristina Rivera Garza (10.00).

Nipping at their heels are literary giants Anne Carson, Mircea Cărtărescu, and Thomas Pynchon (all 12.00). India’s own Amitav Ghosh remains a dark-horse favourite at 13.00, while Can Xue, Murakami, Rushdie, and Atwood keep the global conversation humming.

Even Stephen King lurks at 50.00 — proof that anything can happen when the world’s most unpredictable prize is in play. The champagne’s on ice, the bookmakers are restless, and the literary world holds its breath.

(Odds sourced from NicerOdds, verified October 9 2025.)

As we await this year’s Nobel announcement, it’s worth revisiting the quiet revolution of Jon Fosse, last year’s laureate from Norway. A playwright, poet, novelist, and essayist, Fosse was honoured in 2023 “for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable.” His writing, often described as slow prose, is hypnotic — steeped in pauses, repetition, and silences that speak louder than words.

Fosse, now 64, once said he writes from a place “for listening and movement” — a mental borderland between safety and the unknown. His acclaimed Septology trilogy, written in Norwegian Nynorsk, explores faith, mortality, and art with the spiritual depth of prayer. Critics see in him shades of Ibsen’s introspection and Derrida’s deconstruction, but his voice is wholly his own.

In an age of noise, Fosse reminds us that literature can whisper. His Nobel wasn’t just a win for Norwegian letters — it was a triumph for stillness.

Read More

As the world waits for the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature to be announced, it’s hard not to think back to Annie Ernaux, the French writer who won in 2022 for turning memory into a political act. Her win felt like a reminder that storytelling can be both deeply personal and profoundly collective.

In an interview during her first visit to India, Ernaux spoke candidly about why she writes: to give shape to sorrow, to document the lives that history overlooks. Her style, stripped of ornament and sentiment, seeks fairness over beauty — truth over flourish. “Language is never neutral,” she said, “but it can be honest.”

Her reflections on aging, feminism, and freedom feel especially resonant today. As we count down to this year’s announcement, Ernaux’s voice lingers, a steady compass pointing toward literature that dares to remember.

➡️ Read the full interview: Annie Ernaux on writing, memory, and the long view of life.

When the world felt fractured in 2020, the Nobel Committee chose a poet who had spent a lifetime writing about fracture. Louise Glück, then 77, became only the second woman poet ever to win the Nobel Prize in Literature — honoured “for her unmistakable poetic voice that, with austere beauty, makes individual existence universal.”

A professor at Yale, Glück began writing in her teens, finding music in silence and purpose in pain. Her collections — from The Wild Iris to Averno — are spare yet searing, exploring grief, memory, and the slow art of survival. She once wrote,

“Whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice.” Few lines better define her career.

Glück’s poems don’t demand attention; they whisper, then linger. In her economy of language lies abundance — of feeling, of honesty, of the quiet courage to face the self. In celebrating her, the Nobel celebrated solitude itself.

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A year on from her historic Nobel win, Han Kang continues to haunt readers worldwide. The South Korean novelist — and the first Korean to win the Nobel Prize in Literature — was recognised for her “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”

Han’s obsession with the body — its pain, its rebellion, its memory — began early. At twelve, she discovered hidden photos of the 1980 Gwangju Massacre, a revelation that cracked open her world and became her lifelong literary pulse. In The Vegetarian and Human Acts, she strips civilisation to its raw nerves, writing not about politics but about survival and the quiet dignity of resistance.

By awarding Han, the Swedish Academy — long accused of Eurocentrism — acknowledged a new moral frontier.

Read More

At 85, Margaret Atwood remains a titan of world literature. From The Handmaid’s Tale to The Testaments, her work continues to shape political and cultural discourse. While she’s won nearly every award imaginable, the Nobel has somehow eluded her.

Bookmakers rank her high again this year, and fans call it poetic justice waiting to happen. Atwood herself laughs off the speculation, but her fingerprints are everywhere: dystopia, feminism, irony, and ecological grief.

When George Bernard Shaw received the Nobel Prize in 1925, he was unimpressed. “I can forgive Alfred Nobel for inventing dynamite,” he said, “but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.” Shaw refused the prize money, asking it to fund translations of Swedish literature into English instead.

Sometimes life keeps the winner from Stockholm. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, awarded the Nobel in 1970, was barred from leaving the Soviet Union. The author of The Gulag Archipelago, he represented defiance against censorship and tyranny. His acceptance speech, read in his absence, praised literature as “the candle that burns in darkness.”

It wasn’t until 1974 that Solzhenitsyn received his medal, years after exile and persecution. His absence turned the ceremony into a symbol of resistance, proof that literature can outlast oppression. The Nobel, in that moment, was not just a prize, but a protest.

Only four times in Nobel history have two writers shared the prize. It’s a delicate affair, as the committee prefers a single laureate. Yet in 1904, 1917, 1966, and 1974, the medal went to literary pairs: from Frédéric Mistral and José Echegaray to Swedish writers Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson.

Sharing the Nobel can be both honour and curse. Martinson, who was also a member of the Swedish Academy, faced severe criticism for accepting, and the backlash drove him into despair. But joint prizes also symbolise solidarity that literature can be plural, not solitary. Whether born of compromise or conviction, the shared Nobel remains one of the prize’s most human moments.

Few Nobel-related feuds are as famous as the cold war between Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. When Faulkner was asked about Hemingway’s simple style, he quipped, “He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.” Hemingway’s reply?

“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”

Decades later, both men won the Nobel — Faulkner in 1950, Hemingway in 1954 — and the rivalry became part of literary folklore. Their contrasting styles still define two poles of American writing: baroque density versus minimalist precision. The Academy, in a way, crowned both, reminding us that literature has room for every kind of genius.

Though novelists dominate the Nobel roster, poets have long held a special place in the Academy’s heart. From W.B. Yeats and Pablo Neruda to Seamus Heaney and Louise Glück, poetry has often triumphed when prose felt too predictable. The Swedish Academy tends to award poets in times of cultural flux, as if verse itself becomes a stabilising force.

When Glück won in 2020, she said poetry’s power lies in its “uncompromising intimacy.” Yeats, a century earlier, had called it “the quarrel with ourselves.” Every poetic laureate reaffirms that, in an age of distraction, literature’s oldest form still speaks most directly to the soul.

While the Nobel has gone global, some literary powerhouses remain unrecognised. Countries like Egypt (beyond Naguib Mahfouz), South Korea (until Han Kang’s 2024 triumph), and Nigeria (beyond Wole Soyinka) still await their second names. Others such as Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines, have never seen a laureate at all.

Critics argue that the Academy still favours Western languages and literary forms. Yet the rise of global publishing, translation networks, and digital access means change may finally be coming. With powerful voices emerging from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, the map of literature is expanding fast.

It has been 112 years since Rabindranath Tagore won India’s first, and only, Nobel Prize in Literature for Gitanjali. This year, the literary tide may be turning. As anticipation builds ahead of the announcement, Amitav Ghosh has emerged as a top contender, igniting hope across India’s literary circles.

A Bengali like Tagore, Ghosh’s novels, The Shadow Lines, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, and the Ibis Trilogy — weave history, migration, and climate into sweeping human narratives. Betting platforms such as NicerOdds place him among the frontrunners. If chosen, Ghosh would not only break a century-old drought but also redefine India’s place in the global literary imagination. For now, readers wait, fingers crossed, hearts full.

Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer waited decades for the Nobel, finally receiving it in 2011 after a stroke had left him partially paralysed. When the announcement came, he smiled but could not speak. At the ceremony, his wife read his words, and his presence alone moved the audience to tears.

Tranströmer’s minimalist poems had long been admired by writers worldwide. His Nobel felt like a homecoming, a moment when the Academy recognised one of its own.

Sometimes the winner knows before the world does or at least suspects it. Polish author Wisława Szymborska joked in the early 1990s that if she ever won the Nobel, she’d hide under her bed to avoid the attention. In 1996, she did win, and true to her word, she fled her apartment to escape journalists.

Some writers wait a lifetime. Johannes V Jensen, the Danish novelist and poet, holds the record for the most nominations — over 50 — before finally winning in 1944. Others, such as Jorge Luis Borges or Chinua Achebe, never saw their names announced at all.

The waiting game is a Nobel tradition in itself.

With just hours to go before the Nobel Prize in Literature is announced, speculation in Stockholm has reached fever pitch, and this time, insiders think the odds favour a Western man. After last year’s groundbreaking win by South Korea’s Han Kang, critics predict a return to the old guard.

According to AFP, names circulating among Academy watchers include Gerald Murnane of Australia, Mircea Cărtărescu of Romania, László Krasznahorkai and Péter Nádas of Hungary, and Christian Kracht from Switzerland. Murnane, the reclusive author of The Plains, has emerged as a sentimental favourite, though few know if he even owns a phone to take the call from Stockholm.

Still, the field isn’t all male or Western: India’s Amitav Ghosh has surged in betting odds, while Alexis Wright and Cristina Rivera Garza are both strong outside picks. As one Swedish critic quipped, “The only predictable thing about the Nobel is its unpredictability.”

According to Ladbrokes’ latest odds (updated October 8, 2025), Can Xue and László Krasznahorkai are joint favourites to take home this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature — both sitting at 10/1. It’s a clash of two literary titans: the Chinese avant-garde visionary and the Hungarian master of apocalypse.

Can Xue (real name Deng Xiaohua), 72, is famed for her surreal, dreamlike storytelling — a literary world where reality folds like origami. She’s chasing history as only the third Chinese-born writer to win after Mo Yan (2012) and Gao Xingjian (2000). Krasznahorkai, 71, meanwhile, brings his own brand of slow-burning, dystopian lyricism — his Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance already cult classics.

Trailing just behind at 14/1 is Haruki Murakami, with Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie close at 20/1.

In 1913, Rabindranath Tagore became the first Asian and first non-European Nobel laureate in literature. His acceptance speech, simple yet profound, bridged two worlds. Tagore spoke of the universal spirit of poetry that all literature, no matter its language, seeks communion with the divine in humanity.

He read from Gitanjali, his collection of devotional poems, saying: “I touch by the edge of the far-spreading wing of my song thy feet, which I could never aspire to reach.” His words captivated Europe, offering a spiritual counterpoint to its industrial age. Over a century later, Tagore’s voice remains a symbol of cross-cultural unity.

When William Faulkner accepted the Nobel Prize in 1950, he delivered one of the most celebrated speeches in the prize’s history. Speaking from Stockholm, he declared that the writer’s duty was “to write about the human heart in conflict with itself.” In the shadow of the atomic age, Faulkner urged faith in humanity’s endurance.

It is rare, but it happens. The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded twice in the same year. In 2019, two laureates were named — Olga Tokarczuk for 2018 and Peter Handke for 2019 — to make up for the year the prize was suspended amid scandal. But this wasn’t the first time. Back in 1917, Danish writers Karl Gjellerup and Henrik Pontoppidan shared the award.

Leo Tolstoy, the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, never won the Nobel Prize in Literature. In fact, he was nominated multiple times but consistently overlooked. When the first Nobel was awarded in 1901, Tolstoy was the clear favourite. Instead, the prize went to French poet Sully Prudhomme, whose name has since faded from public memory.

Tolstoy’s rejection was partly due to politics and partly to his moral radicalism. Late in life, he renounced wealth and fame, living as a peasant and preaching pacifism. Some Academy members viewed him as too subversive, even dangerous.

Every year, the Nobel produces at least one name that leaves the world saying, “Who?” In 2014, it was Patrick Modiano of France. Even in Paris, few had read him. Within hours, bookstores sold out of his novels, and overnight, a literary recluse became a global phenomenon.

Modiano’s introspective, memory-obsessed novels such as Missing Person and Dora Bruder explore identity and loss in postwar France. The Nobel spotlight brought his brilliance to millions who might never have discovered him.

Few announcements divided opinion like that of 2019, when the Nobel Committee awarded two prizes: one to Poland’s Olga Tokarczuk and another to Austria’s Peter Handke. Tokarczuk’s win was widely celebrated as her imaginative, boundary-crossing novels resonated globally. Handke’s, however, caused outrage due to his controversial political views and comments on the Yugoslav Wars.

For the first time, the Nobel became a flashpoint for global debate: can we separate art from the artist? The Academy defended its choice, citing literary merit alone. Critics accused it of moral blindness. The uproar forced a reckoning over the subjects of art and autonomy.

Bob Dylan’s 2016 Nobel win may have redefined literature, but it also redefined nonchalance. For weeks after the announcement, Dylan said nothing. The Swedish Academy couldn’t even reach him. When he finally accepted, it was through a brief note and a recorded speech comparing himself to Shakespeare.

While some critics accused him of arrogance, others saw the ultimate poetic gesture, a troubadour too busy making art to attend ceremonies. The Academy, ever formal, was half amused, half exasperated.

In the end, Patti Smith performed A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall in his stead, trembling with emotion.

Here’s one for the literary detectives. Ernest Hemingway’s Nobel medal was stolen, or so the story goes. Awarded in 1954 for The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway received his Nobel in absentia while recovering from a plane crash in Africa. He later presented the medal to the Catholic Church in Cuba as a gesture of gratitude for the island’s hospitality.

Years later, during political upheaval, the medal mysteriously vanished. Some say it was melted down; others claim it still lies hidden in a church vault. The tale has become literary legend.

The Nobel’s long history has honoured writers of every generation, but the oldest ever recipient was Doris Lessing, who won in 2007 at age 87. When the news broke, Lessing was returning from the grocery store. Cameras caught her exclaiming, “Oh, Christ! I’ve won the Nobel!” — an immortal literary moment.

Lessing’s works, from The Golden Notebook to The Grass is Singing, captured the complexities of gender, politics, and power. Her belated recognition was seen as both a celebration and an apology for decades of neglect toward women writers. Her candid, irreverent reaction summed up a career that defied convention and expectation.

Did you know the youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature was just 41? Rudyard Kipling, awarded in 1907, remains the youngest laureate in the prize’s 124-year history. The author of The Jungle Book and Kim, Kipling was honoured “for the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration.”

Even then, the choice sparked debate. Some critics saw him as too colonial, too close to empire. Others hailed him as a genius who captured the spirit of his time. His youth added to the controversy. Could someone so young already embody literary immortality? A century later, the question lingers, even as his rhythmic storytelling continues to captivate.

From Antigua to Vermont, Jamaica Kincaid has cultivated a voice both lyrical and fierce. Her novels and essays, especially Annie John and A Small Place , explore the aftershocks of colonialism through the intimacy of personal memory.

This year, bookmakers list her as a strong contender. Kincaid’s prose, rooted in anger and wonder, feels tailor-made for our fragmented era. Her preoccupations, including belonging, motherhood, and inheritance, have universal reach. Should she win, it would be both overdue recognition and poetic justice for a writer who made the postcolonial personal.

Every Nobel season, someone remembers Jorge Luis Borges. The Argentine writer reshaped world literature, influencing everyone from Umberto Eco to Salman Rushdie, yet never received the Nobel. Politics played its part, the Academy reportedly found his right-wing sympathies troubling.

Still, Borges’s shadow looms large over every literary shortlist. His metaphysical stories, comprising infinite libraries, circular time, imaginary encyclopedias, changed how we think about fiction itself.

Amitav Ghosh’s fiction has always travelled across oceans, eras, and languages. But his recent works, particularly The Great Derangement and Gun Island, turned his gaze toward the planet itself. Ghosh reimagines the novel as a tool for ecological storytelling, connecting colonial trade routes to today’s climate crisis.

In Nobel circles, he represents a growing recognition that literature can confront environmental catastrophe without abandoning narrative beauty. His epic imagination and moral urgency make him a dark horse contender in 2025.

It is October 9, 2025, and the literary world is buzzing and betting. The Nobel Prize in Literature is just hours away. Leading the field is reclusive Australian novelist Gerald Murnane at 6.00, followed closely by Hungary’s labyrinthine storyteller László Krasznahorkai at 7.00, and Mexico’s genre-bending Cristina Rivera Garza at 10.00.

Hot on their heels come heavyweights Anne Carson, Mircea Cărtărescu, and Thomas Pynchon (all at 12.00), while India’s own Amitav Ghosh sits just behind at 13.00.

Further down, dreamers like Can Xue and Michel Houellebecq hover near 15.00, with Murakami, Kincaid, and Rushdie keeping hope alive at 18.00. The list also includes Allende, Ko Un, Margret Atwood and Stephen King (50.00).

(Sourced from NicerOdds)

Few names evoke literary resilience like Salman Rushdie. Long a staple of Nobel speculation, the Indian-British author has spent decades at the centre of art, politics, and free speech debates. Following his recovery from a brutal attack in 2022, Rushdie’s work has taken on new resonance.

With Victory City (2023), he returned to mythmaking with astonishing vitality. Bookmakers now list him among this year’s top contenders, though Rushdie remains characteristically dismissive of awards.

Enrique Vila-Matas, 76 years
Spain

Vila-Matas delights in dismantling literature from within. His novels, including Bartleby & Co. (2000) and Dublinesque (2010), circle the theme of writers who cannot write, books that cannot be finished, and stories about the impossibility of storytelling. It’s literature about literature, delivered with wit and melancholy. Spain has not had a Nobel since Vargas Llosa in 2010 — Vila-Matas could be the one to end that 15-year gap.

Ahead of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2011, Ladbrokes threw a pleasant surprise for Indians - there were a few Indians in the list.

Among the top 10 odds were: Rajasthani story writer Vijaydan Detha - whose works include Duvisha ( Paheli), Charandas Chor and Parinati - with 5.5/1 odds. and Malayalam poet, translator and critic K Satchidanandan at 25/1. Emminent Bengali writer and Magsaysay winner Mahasweta Devi was there lower down in the list with 80/1, but still ahead of Salman Rushdie at 50/1. The list was led by Syrian poet Adonis with 4/1. In fact Satchidanandan had translated some of Adonis' works into Malayalam.

The Literature Nobel that year ( 2011) went to Swedish poet and translator Tomas Tranströmer - another reminder that bookies' favourites are more often at odds with what the Nobel Committee thinks.

Can Xue, 72 years

China

Odds: 14/1

Can Xue’s radical interiority makes her an unexpected but vital voice on the list. At 14/1, Xue remains the long‑shot, yet the kind of long-shot whose risk feels vital. For years she has loomed in the periphery of Nobel speculations—not for lack of mastery, but because her terrain is so radical: dream-logic, ontological disorientation, radical interiority.

Can Xue’s claim rests on a transgressive reinvention of fiction. Her novels and stories tend to unfold like dreams felt, not explained: voices multiply, settings morph, motifs drift in and out like memories half-remembered. Her experiments with self, language, and the abyss resist stable reading even while they pull the reader deeper into the narrative. To bet on her is to envision a Nobel Prize granted less to narrative comfort and more to imaginative rupture.

(UK-based betting site NicerOdds)

Thomas Pynchon, 88 years

America

Odds: 11/1

The reclusive genius of American fiction remains a long-standing, long-odds favourite. To place Pynchon also at 11/1 is to hold faith in the possibility that the Great American Novel can continue to be haunted by conspiracy, paranoia, entropy -- and still sing. He is, to many readers, the emblem of postmodern ambition — over six decades, works from Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) to Inherent Vice (2009) have demonstrated a restless appetite for connection, decay, and eccentric humour.

His obscurity — the fact that he refused to give interviews or take photographs -- is as much a part of the myth as his prose.

Pynchon’s claim to fame is his boldness of scope. From The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) to Mason & Dixon (1997) to Against the Day (2006), he layers history, science, paranoia, humour, tragedy, and the absurd. His voice is kaleidoscopic -- registers shift, timelines blur, characters sprawl. But within that complexity is coherence, a haunted sense of pattern in chaos, a moral undercurrent, and a knowing playfulness. His artistry is the harmonisation of multiplicity. To wager on Pynchon is to hope the Nobel might one day honour the audacity of scale, the empathy beneath the labyrinth, the conviction that fiction can still be a sprawl, not a formula.

(UK-based betting site NicerOdds)

Mircea Cărtărescu, 69 years
Romania
Odds: 11/1

At once lyrical and cerebral, Cărtărescu brings scale and soul to postmodern fiction.

Mircea Cărtărescu’s equal stake at 11/1 signals eastern Europe’s claim to the centre. A poet, critic, novelist, he is among Romania’s most ambitious literary craftsmen. Cărtărescu is celebrated for works such as Nostalgia (1989), Blinding (1996), and Solenoid (2015), where multilayered narrative, lyrical intensity, and metaphoric density intersect. He weaves mythic resonances into everyday detail, collapsing the borders of fantastic and real. At his best, he offers not only spectacle, but a sustained inner life – characters as consciousness rather than protagonists. His artistry lies in generosity – even as he builds labyrinths, he refuses to close the doors.

Cărtărescu’s prose is not minimalist. He invites his reader into dream‑cathedrals of consciousness, where metaphor is architecture and imagination is subterranean geography. A nod to him is, in a way, a promise: that literature can remain as audacious as it is humane.

(UK-based betting site NicerOdds)

Haruki Murakami, 76 years
Japan
Odds: 11/1

Despite his popularity, the Nobel has always slipped through his fingers -- so far

At long odds, Murakami continues his perennial role in Nobel betting: the novelist who has become the archetype. His oeuvre -- from Norwegian Wood (1987) to Kafka on the Shore (2002) to 1Q84 (2009-10) -- frames everyday lives as thresholds to other realities. His narrators frequently drift from the banal into the uncanny, and the boundary between waking and dreaming is porous. His voice is elegiac, melancholic, open, with a quiet authority that belies the strangeness of his worlds. To wager on him is to affirm the global reach of his magical realism, his blend of loneliness, jazz, cats, alternate realms, and subterranean longing.

Murakami’s finest gifts lie in tonal alchemy -- he allows the ordinary and the uncanny to breathe side by side. A man stepping through a door into another world, an unanswered phone call echoing for years, jazz records as a portal to memory -- these tropes recur, but always with new variation. His novels are at once melancholic and spacious, his characters often suspended between identities. Yet, the very familiarity of his themes sometimes works against him in Nobel speculation. An 11/1 chance for him is almost a kind of elegy, unless 2025 proves to be a lucky year.

(UK-based betting site NicerOdds)

Cristina Rivera Garza, 61 years
Mexico
Odds: 9/1

The Mexican writer's blend of archive, fiction, and memory positions her at the literary edge. With odds of 9/1, Rivera Garza is a dark horse, a writer whose territory is border, rupture, and spectral presence. Her presence on the list is itself a kind of claim for literature to reckon with the margins, with absence, with lives unrecorded and suggests a willingness to engage with voices forged in the interstices of history.

Rivera Garza’s distinction comes from a restless hybridity. She moves fluently among genres—fiction, autobiography, essay, archival excavation—blurring boundaries. In works like The Iliac Crest (2002), Liliana’s Invincible Summer (2021), and her numerous bilingual or translingual texts, she confronts disappearance, violence, and identity with an interrogative edge. She crafts narrators who press against gaps in memory, whose subjectivity is porous, haunted, mutable. Her language is precise, unsettling, intimate, an artistry born of disjunction — she fragments, parries, elides, and in that space we feel the strain of history itself.

(UK-based betting site NicerOdds)

László Krasznahorkai, 71 years
Hungary
Odds: 6/1

With sentences that span pages and worlds that teeter on ruin, Krasznahorkai is literature’s patient architect of the apocalypse.

At 6/1, Krasznahorkai is the next favourite. His renown comes from his daring architecture of despair. In Satantango (1985), The Melancholy of Resistance (1989), Seiobo There Below (2008), his sentences spiral, often unbroken, through darkness and grace. His narrative momentum is anachronistic yet electric; his ambient dread is never gratuitous. Critics have called him “the father of the apocalypse novel”, in part because he insists that ruin is the default mode of being. His artistry resides in tension — of broken systems resisting collapse, of moral possibility clinging to ruin, of human will ranged against cosmic implacability.

Krasznahorkai’s voice is both terse and delirious, compact and expanding. The world in his hands is always on the verge of implosion, yet holds a strange redemptive gleam. To place 6/1 on him is to recognise that the Nobel may bequeath its gravest prize to a poet of collapse -- a recognition of how language endures when all else has faltered.

(UK-based betting site NicerOdds)

Gerald Murnane, 86 years

Australia

Odds: 5/1

The reclusive Australian novelist leads the betting with his meditative, metafictional landscapes and radical inwardness.

With odds of 5/1 at NicerOdds, Murnane stands as the bookmakers’ favourite, signalling both respect and the audacity of quiet ambition. A writer who inhabits the contours of memory, perception, and the limits of the self, Murnane’s artistry is in his resolute refusal to adhere to conventional narratives. His early novel, The Plains (1982), became a cultural touchstone, buoyed less by plot and more by a language astute in capturing the contours of absence.

Successive works deepened a labyrinth of recurring motifs — horse racing, stained glass, boundary lines. His sentences often fold into themselves; his fictional worlds overlap with his archival preoccupations. In that space, he conjures a literature of interior geography where the external landscape is subsidiary.

From The Plains to Inland (1988) to Border Districts (2017), his work burrows into landscapes both actual and mental, turning flat expanses into sites of metaphysical weight. In his hands, literature is not spectacle but excavation, a patient inquiry into what cannot be said directly. Could the quiet man from the tiny town of Goroke in Victoria, who has never boarded a plane or owned a camera, really make it to literature’s highest honour?

(UK-based betting site NicerOdds)

Each October, as speculation builds around the Nobel Prize in Literature, bookmakers release their odds, based on a curious assessment of literary merit and market behaviour. Occasionally, they get it right: Bob Dylan and Olga Tokarczuk rose in the betting ranks before their wins.

More often, though, the odds fail to anticipate the Swedish Academy’s choices. That pattern of surprise says something profound about literature itself – that it resists consensus, eludes prediction, and thrives on the unexpected voice. The bets, however, persist, not as prophecy, but as a portrait of what the literary world hopes, fears, and believes deserves to endure.

Though the Nobel is awarded annually, there have been years when no writer was deemed worthy, or when war made awarding impossible. The prize was suspended in 1914, 1918, and from 1940 to 1943 due to the World Wars. In 1935, it was withheld because, according to the Academy, “no suitable living candidate” was found.

When Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, it sent shockwaves through the literary world. Could song lyrics be literature? The Swedish Academy said yes, praising Dylan for “creating new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” Fans called it revolutionary; purists called it sacrilege.

Dylan’s silence after the announcement only deepened the drama. He skipped the ceremony, later sending a speech in which he compared himself to Shakespeare — another writer who never expected to win awards. The episode forced a global rethink of what literature means in the 21st century. If storytelling is humanity’s oldest art form, perhaps melody is just another medium. Nearly a decade later, Dylan’s win still stands as the Nobel’s boldest and most divisive choice.

Also Read: Rebel and the Nobel

Not every writer dreams of winning the Nobel. In fact, two of the 20th century’s greatest figures — Jean-Paul Sartre and Boris Pasternak — famously refused it. Sartre, awarded in 1964, rejected the prize as a protest against institutional authority, declaring that a writer “must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution.” Pasternak’s refusal in 1958, by contrast, was coerced. The Soviet government forced him to decline the award for Doctor Zhivago, banned in his homeland. His acceptance would have endangered his life and family.

These refusals remain part of Nobel lore. Sartre’s medal was never minted; Pasternak’s was later collected by his son in 1989.

The Nobel Prize in Literature faced its gravest crisis in 2018, when allegations of sexual misconduct and conflicts of interest involving the husband of an Academy member plunged the institution into chaos. The scandal led to multiple resignations, public outrage, and for the first time since World War II, the suspension of the prize.

The following year, the Academy rebuilt itself with new members and transparency reforms, awarding two prizes in 2019 — one for 2018 (to Polish author Olga Tokarczuk) and one for 2019 (to Austrian writer Peter Handke). The episode reshaped the Nobel’s reputation, forcing it to reckon with questions of ethics, accountability, and gender representation.

Also Read: Nobel in Literature: A scandal, two years’ Nobels, and why these authors were chosen

Few realise that behind many Nobel winners stand translators who make their work accessible to the committee. The Swedish Academy reads widely, but not all members read every language. For contenders writing in Arabic, Japanese, or Swahili, translators become their unseen champions. Often, a brilliant translation can mean the difference between obscurity and recognition.

Take the case of Rabindranath Tagore, whose Gitanjali reached Stockholm through an English version edited by W.B. Yeats. Without that translation, Tagore’s luminous verses might never have crossed linguistic borders.

Also Read: Tagore and Yeats: How a Nobel-winning friendship fell apart

Behind the glitter of the Nobel stage lies a world of guarded secrecy. The Swedish Academy, composed of 18 members elected for life, conducts its deliberations in near-total silence. Every document, vote, and debate is sealed for fifty years. Not even the shortlist is revealed until half a century later. The reason, according to tradition, is to preserve the purity of judgment and to protect writers from public lobbying and political pressure.

This secrecy, however, adds to the mystique and the criticism. Every October, speculation explodes precisely because the process is invisible. Only one person breaks the silence: the Academy’s permanent secretary, who steps before cameras to announce a single name that instantly becomes part of history. For all the transparency the world demands today, the Nobel Prize in Literature continues to thrive on the thrill of the unknown.

Welcome, readers! It is that time of year again, when bookmakers, critics, and literature lovers around the world hold their breath, waiting for the Swedish Academy to reveal who will join the storied list of Nobel laureates. The Nobel Prize in Literature, established in 1901, has honoured some of the greatest voices of our times — from Rabindranath Tagore and Toni Morrison to Svetlana Alexievich and Jon Fosse. But the prize is also famous for its surprises. Will the Academy reward a perennial favourite at last, or spotlight a lesser-known name that changes how we see literature itself? Stay with us as we track contenders, odds, history, and all the live drama.