Five Authors We Thought Might Win the Nobel—Including One Who Did

Updated: 2022-10-06 08:50:00
Editor’s Note: On October 6, Annie Ernaux was announced as the winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Predicting the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature is a fool’s errand. I should know: For the past seven years, I’ve tried to guess the winner based on odds from the British sportsbook Ladbrokes and never once gotten it right. I have gotten it spectacularly wrong several times, however—including in 2016, when I said that Bob Dylan would definitely not win the Nobel Prize in Literature, which he did days later.

Despite this track record, I continue to make predictions about the prize. Why? Two reasons. One is that it’s a fun, low-stakes way to engage with the literary world, which most people take way too seriously. And the other is that it remains the single best global survey of literature. Despite recent scandals, controversy,