Anne Carson and Can Xue favourites to win Nobel prize in literature

The Canadian poet and Chinese experiment writer are the bookmakers’ favourites to win, with Haruki Murakami, Gerald Murnane and Margaret Atwood also in the mix

Canadian poet Anne Carson and Chinese experimental writer Can Xue are the bookies’ favourites to win this year’s Nobel prize in literature, set to be announced Thursday.

The frontrunners both have 10/1 odds of taking home the world’s most prestigious literary prize, this year worth 12m Swedish Krona (approximately £900,000), according to Ladbrokes.

The 76-year-old Carson is known for her hybrid style, mixing poetry and prose, and combining contemporary stories with ancient myth. Among her best-known works is her 1998 verse novel Autobiography of Red, a queer coming-of-age story that reworks a Greek poem about Heracles.

Can Xue has been a favourite for several years running. The 73-year-old, whose real name is Deng Xiaohua, has twice been longlisted for the International Booker for the novel Love in the New Millennium – translated by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen – and for her short story collection I Live in the Slums, translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping.

Coming in behind Carson and Can Xue is Haruki Murakami with odds of 14/1. The Japanese writer is one of the biggest international sellers among the favourites, known for works including Norwegian Wood and Kafka on the Shore.

Ladbrokes also have Australian avant garde writer Gerald Murnane in the mix, along with American postmodern novelist Thomas Pynchon, both with odds of 16/1.

And at 20/1 odds are seven writers: Margaret Atwood, Cristina Rivera Garza, Enrique Vila-Matas, Jamaica Kincaid, Lídia Jorge, Lyudmila Ulitskaya and Michel Houellebecq.

Canadian novelist Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale, already has many of literature’s biggest prizes under her belt, including the Booker and the Giller prize.

Meanwhile, Mexican author Rivera Garza won the Pulitzer prize in 2024 for Liliana’s Invincible Summer, a memoir about her 20-year-old sister, who was murdered by a former boyfriend.

Vila-Matas is one of Spain’s most prominent novelists, known for blending fiction with essay. In 2020, he was longlisted for the International Booker prize for his metafictional novel Mac and His Problem, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Sophie Hughes.

Kincaid is an Antiguan-American writer, best known for books including Annie John, A Small Place and Lucy, which often explore family relationships and colonialism’s destructiveness. Kincaid “is a writer you don’t just read; she is a writer that takes you back to yourself”, wrote the poet Jackie Kay in 2022.

At longer odds are Karl Ove Knausgård, Alexis Wright, Colm Tóibín, César Aira, Deborah Levy, Don DeLillo, Emmanuel Carrère, Leila Aboulela, Michael Ondaatje, Mircea Cărtărescu and Salman Rushdie.

The winner will be announced at 12pm UK time (1pm CEST) on Thursday. Last year’s recipient was the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai. Other recent winners include Han Kang, Jon Fosse, Annie Ernaux and Abdulrazak Gurnah.