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Crowd-pleaser or obscure pick for literature Nobel?

The Nobel Literature Prize will be announced on Thursday, with speculation in literary circles split over whether it will go to an overdue bestselling author or a relative unknown lifted into the spotlight.

The Swedish Academy will reveal its pick at 1:00 pm (1100 GMT) in Stockholm. Last year, the prestigious award went to British-Tanzanian author Abdulrazak Gurnah. American poet Louise Gluck won it the year before.

Literary critics and Nobel watchers are split into two camps this year.

There are those who see the Academy’s past choices as confirmation that it sees no need to crown renowned authors, especially those who already sell millions of books.

And then there are those who think it could be time to award a writer known and loved the world over.

The 18-member Swedish Academy is still recovering from a 2017-2018 #MeToo scandal that left it in tatters, and its controversial awarding of the 2019 Nobel to Austrian novelist Peter Handke.

Famed — and lambasted — for its male Eurocentric Nobel picks, the revamped Academy has since gone on to award an American woman and a man born in Zanzibar whose work focuses on the plight of refugees and exile, colonialism and racism.

The jury has repeatedly maintained that its prize is neither political nor subject to gender or ethnic quotas, and insists that its only criteria is the quality of a writer’s body of work.

– ‘Well-known name’ –

Nonetheless, “the Academy is now very conscious of its reputation when it comes to diversity and gender representation, in a totally different way than they were before the 2017-2018 scandal”, Bjorn Wiman, culture editor at Sweden’s newspaper of reference Dagens Nyheter, told AFP.

“I think we can expect a more well-known name this year, after last year’s surprise,” he said.

If the Academy were to lean that way, the prize could go to public favourites Haruki Murakami of Japan, Joyce Carol Oates and Cormac McCarthy of the US and Canada’s Margaret Atwood, who have all been mentioned in Nobel speculation for years.

But after two well-received laureates, the Academy could also venture for a more polemic pick this time, with France’s Michel Houellebecq — known for controversial remarks on Islam, among others — topping some betting sites this year.

Canada’s Anne Carson was also a favourite with bookies, along with Salman Rushdie, the controversial British author of “The Satanic Verses” who was the victim of an attempted murder attack in August.

Another political choice, in the context of the war in Ukraine, would be Russian novelist Lyudmila Ulitskaya, exiled in Berlin and a fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin.

Her name has regularly made the rounds in Nobel speculation in recent years, as have Hungarian authors Peter Nadas and Laszlo Krasznahorkai, French novelists Annie Ernaux and Maryse Conde, Norwegians Jon Fosse and Karl Ove Knausgaard, Kenya’s Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Croatia’s Dubravka Ugresic, Americans Thomas Pynchon and Don…

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