With Gerald Murnane leading the odds and Cristina Rivera Garza among the surprise contenders, the race for the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature is wide open. As always, the Swedish Academy is poised to surprise.
The 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced on October 9 (Thursday), and the anticipation, like every year, feels feverish. Every October, the guessing game begins afresh. Since the Swedish Academy keeps its cards close to its chest, the speculation falls to bookmakers, who cobble together odds based on literary reputation, talks in the publishing world, and, frankly, a dash of wild guessing. The result is a list that reads like the who’s who of world literature: heavyweights, dark horses, and, occasionally, the kind of names that make you laugh out loud.
For readers, publishers, and critics, the Nobel Prize confers immortality, besides lots of money. This year’s laureate will walk away with 11 million Swedish kronor (about $1.2 million), but the real reward is being ushered into the circle of laureates from around the world. If one were to look at the winners of the last 10 years, the list, in terms of geography, form and thematic preoccupation is mind-bogglingly diverse: Svetlana Alexievich (2015), Bob Dylan (2016), Kazuo Ishiguro (2017), Olga Tokarczuk (2018), Peter Handke (2019), Louise Glück (2020), Abdulrazak Gurnah (2021), Annie Ernaux (2022), Jon Fosse (2023) and Han Kang (2024).
This year, according to UK betting site NicerOdds, Australian novelist Gerald Murnane figures at the top with 5/1 odds. Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai trails just behind at 6/1, while Cristina Rivera Garza, the Mexican novelist and essayist, makes a surprise leap to third place at 9/1. The perennial favourite Haruki Murakami hovers at 11/1, tied with Mircea Cărtărescu and Thomas Pynchon. Meanwhile, Can Xue, long considered a front-runner, has dropped to 14/1 after two years at the top. That decline might mean her moment has passed. Or, more tantalisingly, it could mean this is finally her year.
Familiar faces, fresh surprises
Odds lists are a curious mix of the expected and the surprising. Some names appear year after year, sustained by a reputation for serious literature. Others pop up suddenly, sparking discussions on behind-the-scenes lobbying, recent critical acclaim, or a groundswell of support from translators and publishers.
Murnane’s steady rise is a story in itself. The 85-year-old Australian has spent much of his life in relative obscurity, writing intensely interior novels that meditate on memory, landscape, and the act of seeing. Often described as a “writer’s writer,” Murnane has been lauded by critics and small presses but has never achieved Murakami-level readership. A Nobel win would catapult him into global recognition, and validate the Academy’s penchant for honouring reclusive (JM Coetzee, Doris Lessing, et al) formally daring voices.
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Hungarian novelist and screenwriter László Krasznahorkai’s novels, with their labyrinthine sentences and apocalyptic imagery, have earned him a reputation as one of the most demanding and rewarding writers alive. His collaborations with filmmaker Béla Tarr (most famously Sátántangó) have established his reputation as a chronicler of despair and decay in post-Soviet Europe. At 6/1, he looks like a classic Nobel pick: European, a stalwart, and widely translated.
The surprise this year is Pulitzer Prize-winning Mexican author and Professor Cristina Rivera Garza, whose sudden jump into the top three feels may prove to be something of an early indication after all. Rivera Garza’s work, across fiction and memoir, grapples with violence, migration, and feminism. She has written multiple novels, including Nadie me verá llorar (No One Will See Me Cry, 1999), which received Mexico’s highest literary awards.
In Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister's Search for Justice (2023), which won the Pulitzer prize for memoir last year, she tells the story of her sister, Liliana, who was murdered in 1990 Mexico by her boyfriend. Her novel The Taiga Syndrome (2018) takes the bones of a Latin American detective story and twists them into a dreamlike meditation on loss and language that slips between fairy tale and noir.
In her short but masterful novel The Iliac Crest, originally published in 2002 and translated by Sarah Booker in 2017, Garza, who teaches at University of Houston, uses the frame of a gothic mystery to unpick gender, identity, and the violence of erasure. It’s an audacious novel that evokes Mexican women writers. Garza’s recognition would mark a big shift for the Academy toward Latin America — 15 years after Mario Vargas Llosa won — and toward writers who dismantle literary form in service of urgent politics.
The Murakami-Rushdie question
Year after year, Murakami appears on the odds lists, and year after year, his name is called out by pundits only to be left hanging when the Academy chooses someone else. Murakami is, by any metric, one of the most successful living novelists, with a global readership that devours his surreal, jazz-infused, melancholy novels and short stories. He has, inarguably, shaped the literary imagination of several generations.
Also read: Chinese writer Can Xue bookies’ favourite to win 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature
But perhaps therein lies the paradox: his popularity may be his Achilles’ heel. The Swedish Academy has historically preferred writers who are admired in literary circles but remain underappreciated by the mass market. Murakami’s global fame, like Salman Rushdie’s, makes him look like an obvious choice, and the Academy hates the obvious. Still, at 11/1, he remains in contention, if only because his body of work is huge, and counting. If the Academy wants to bridge the gap between the “literary” and the “popular,” Murakami is the clearest candidate.
Similarly, Rushdie’s name also crops up every year, but he belongs to an earlier phase of literary experimentation. He remains a potent symbol of artistic freedom as well as a novelist of dazzling invention. His odds (17/1) reflect the Academy’s dilemma: reward a major figure whose work has already been canonised, or avoid the political maelstrom that would inevitably follow. Since the Nobel Committee tends to avoid rewarding a writer whose public life has become larger than their art, my guess is that the Nobel will look past both Murakami and Rushdie.
The depth of the field
Sharing Murakami’s odds bracket are Mircea Cărtărescu, the Romanian novelist whose baroque, dreamlike trilogy Orbitor has made him a cult figure in Europe, and Thomas Pynchon, the famously reclusive American novelist. A Pynchon win would be the stuff of legend: imagine the Nobel ceremony with the laureate absent, as he almost certainly would be.
Further down the odds, the list becomes even more eclectic. Can Xue, the Chinese experimentalist whose difficult, surrealist novels have long been tipped for the Nobel, has dropped to 14/1. But this could be a strategic underestimation: after all, when Mo Yan won in 2012, his odds had cooled in the weeks leading up to the prize.
Michel Houellebecq, France’s enfant terrible, is placed at 14/1. A win for him would be the Academy’s most controversial decision in years, given his divisive politics and misanthropic stand. Equally intriguing is Antiguan–American novelist, essayist Jamaica Kincaid at 17/1, a writer whose sharp explorations of colonialism and identity feel as urgent today as when she first emerged on the literary scene, with At the Bottom of the River, a collection of short stories, in 1983.
The mid-tier, above Rushdie, also includes Anne Carson (19/1), whose hybrid poetry-essay-memoirs have redefined what literary form can be. Other names — César Aira, Enrique Vila-Matas, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Colm Tóibín — round out a field that reflects global modernism in all its forms. Each would send a distinct message about what the Academy thinks literature should do in 2025. If you ask me, all four are among the most original and inventive writers. Needless to say, if either of them wins, this writer could not be happier.
Patterns and politics
The betting odds, however, are only half the story. No amount of bookmaker speculation can predict the Academy’s decision, but patterns are worth noting. In recent years, the Nobel has tilted toward writers who write with a sense of political urgency as well as those who experiment with genres, showing what language and literature could do: Annie Ernaux for her autobiography, Jon Fosse for his minimalist drama, and Han Kang for her haunting explorations of trauma and memory.
The through-line is clear: the Academy wants to honour writers who unsettle, provoke, and experiment. Observing the past patterns take us to names like Rivera Garza and Can Xue, who all stretch literature’s formal possibilities. It also means mainstream giants like Murakami, Rushdie or even Margaret Atwood for that matter face an uphill battle, unless the Academy decides it is time to “reward the obvious.”
Also read: Norwegian author Jon Fosse wins the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature
Geography matters, too. With recent prizes skewing European and Asian, some argue it’s time for a Latin American laureate again. That makes Garza, Aira, or Vila-Matas strong symbolic choices. Similarly, awarding Alexis Wright, the Indigenous Australian novelist, would be both a literary and political statement.
The wildcards
Every year, the Nobel throws in a curveball. In 2016, Bob Dylan shocked the world. In 2014, Patrick Modiano left many outside France scratching their heads. Even Han Kang’s 2024 win came as a surprise to bettors who had other names pegged. This year’s wildcards include singer-songwriter Paul Simon (49/1), whose mere presence on the list seems to be the bookies trolling us after Bob Dylan’s 2016 win.
Stephen King (also 49/1) is another name that raises eyebrows: hugely influential, yes, but highly unlikely given the Academy’s disdain for genre fiction. And yet stranger things have happened. There’s also the sentimental picks: Atwood (34/1), who many feel has long deserved the honour, or Joyce Carol Oates (29/1), whose sheer productivity makes her a perennial nominee. They’re less likely, but Nobel watchers like yours truly know better than to rule anyone out.
The Nobel Prize in Literature remains singular for the fact that it doesn’t just reward a book or a season, it rewards a lifetime in literature, a voice, and a worldview. A Nobel win catapults obscure names into global conversations. Think of Svetlana Alexievich in 2015, whose oral histories suddenly became international bestsellers. Or Olga Tokarczuk in 2018, who went from a Polish literary hero to a global figure overnight.
And that’s why the odds matter less than the outcome. No matter who wins on October 9, thousands of readers will likely be introduced to a new name, a new language, a new form of storytelling. So, who will it be in 2025? It could be any one of the writers mentioned above or one among the following: Carl Frode Tiller, Ersi Sotiropoulos, Péter Nádas, Pierre Michon, Raul Zúrita, all of whom are at the same place in the bookies scheme of things (19/1). Or Helle Helle, Isabel Allende, Ko Un, Milton Hatoum and Yoko Tawada whose odds are 24/1. Or Elena Poniatowska, Homero Aridjis and Ludmila Ulitskaja (29/1). Having said that, the truth is, the Swedish Academy will almost certainly surprise us. So, the safe answer is: your guess is as good as mine.
