Alexievich, Murakami, U.S. veterans favorites for Nobel in Literature

The Belarusian Svetlana Alexievich, Japan’s Haruki Murakami and American veteran writers such as Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth are dominating the nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature, whose winner will be unveiled on Thursday in the Swedish Academy.

Alexievich seems like the strongest bet in Stockholm and has been endorsed, among others, by Maria Schottenius, former head of culture at Dagens Nyheter, a major Swedish newspaper.

Her selection would mean rewarding a hypothetical first Nobel for journalistic reportage, a genre that could have already been recognized in 2007 in the figure of the Polish Ryszard Kapuscinski, if he had not died that year, Swedish media speculated.

After Alexievich comes Murakami, who has global sales success but is not as appreciated by critics and has been a permanent nominee for a Nobel Prize in recent years.

Oates, Roth and Don DeLillo are prominent American authors who could benefit from the fact that this country has not been awarded since 1993 with Toni Morrison, although the Swedish Academy always insists that it does not reward countries, but authors.

The nominees list also includes Kenya’s Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Norwegian Jon Fosse, South Korean Ko Un, the Somali Nuruddin Farah, Canadian Anne Carson and Romanian Mircea Cartarescu.

Ireland’s John Banville, Egyptian Nawal elSaadawi, Hungarian Peter Nadas, Austrian Peter Handke, Algerian Assia Djebar, Canadian Margaret Atwood and the Albanian Ismail Kadare are other names on the list of 198 aspiring candidates in 2015.

Selections in recent years have alternated between expected favorites (Chinese Mo Yan or Canadian Alice Munro), some surprises (Austrian Elfriede Jelinek and German Herta Muller) and veterans that seemed forgotten, like the British Harold Pinter and Doris Lessing and Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa.

Llosa, the author of “The Green House” and “The Cubs”, awarded in 2010, has so far been the last writer in Spanish recognized by the Swedish Academy.

The Argentinian Cesar Aira is the representative for Spanish literature that appears better situated in forecasts, ahead of Spaniards Javier Marias, Juan Goytisolo, Eduardo Mendoza, Enrique VilaMatas and Juan Marse.

The list of aspiring poets has decreased appreciably since the Swedish Thomas Transtromer won in 2011, but the Syrian Adonis and the Polish Adam Zagajewski still appear.