Who will win this year's Nobel Prize in Literature?

We’re fully in the swing of Nobel Prize announcements week. Between 2-9 October, all the winners of the most coveted awards in their fields will be announced.

On Monday, the scientists behind the mRNA Covid vaccines won the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Yesterday, scientists using light pulses to study electrons won the Nobel Prize in Physics. And today, the scientists who discovered quantum dots won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

But it’s Thursday's announcement, the Nobel Prize in Literature, that has the Culture desk most excited. Awarded since 1901, the Nobel laureates have been celebrated for having, according to Alfred Nobel’s initial guidelines, “in the field of literature, produced the most outstanding work in an idealistic direction.”

To be announced at the Swedish Academy, the winner will also take home 11,000,000 SEK (around €9.5 million).

Last year’s winner was the French writer Annie Ernaux, who won “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.” She’s best known for her personal memoir ‘Les Années’ (The Years).

Other winners of the prize have included Olga Tokarczuk in 2018, Kazuo Ishiguro in 2017, and the songwriter Bob Dylan in 2016. Over the last century, the prize has recognised some of the biggest figures in literature, including Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez, Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, and Selma Lagerlöf.

In advance of the announcement for 2023’s Nobel Prize in Literature, here are the (accurate at time of writing) bookies' odds for the likely next laureate.

Top of the list is the experimental Chinese writer Can Xue. Can, born in 1953, grew up under the strain of her parents’ denouncement by the Communist Party as