Nobel Prize Winner in Literature Han Kang

(Photo: Jon Fosse receiving Nobel Prize in Literature in 2023 from H.M. King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden at Konserthuset Stockholm on 10 December 2023. © Nobel Prize Outreach. Photo: Nanaka Adachi)

Update: the winner of Nobel Prize 2024 is Han Kang from South Korea

There is always a lot of speculation every year about who will win the Nobel Prize in Literature, which not only brings prestige and honor to the winner but also to the author's home country.

Prediction by betting company

According to the betting company Bettson, Australian novelist Gerald Murnane and Chinese author Can Xue are the most likely to receive the prize. Here is the list of the most likely winners [1]:

Gerald Murnane, Australia
Can Xue, China
Jamaica Kincaid, Antiguan-American
Alex Wright, Australia
Anne Carson, Canada
Ko Un, South Korea
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Kenya
Thomas Pynchon, USA
Mircea Cartarescu, Romania
Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Hungary
Yoko Tawada, Japan
Han Kang, South Korea

10 Previous Nobel Prize Winners in Literature

2023: Jon Fosse, Norway with the motivation: "for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable"
2022: Annie Ernaux, France with the motivation: "for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory"
2021: Abdulrazak Gurnah, UK/Zanzibar with the motivation: "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents"
2020: Louise Glück, USA with the motivation: "for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal"
2019: Peter Handke, Austria with the motivation: "for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience"
2018: Olga Tokarczuk, Poland with motivation: "for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life"
2017: Kazuo Ishiguro, UK/Japan with the motivation: "who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world"
2016: Bob Dylan, USA with the motivation: "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition"
2015: Svetlana Alexievich, Belarus with the motivation: "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time"
2014: Patrick Modiano, France with the motivation: "for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation"