After several years of scandals and wildcard picks, the Swedish Academy will on Thursday crown the 2020 Nobel Literature Prize laureate.
Speculation in Stockholm’s literary circles meanwhile covers a long list of names, including Caribbean-American author Jamaica Kincaid, Canadian poet Anne Carson, Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Hungary’s Peter Nadas and Laszlo Krasznahorkai.
In 2018 the award was postponed after sex abuse allegations rocked the Swedish Academy that chooses the winners, and sparked a mass exodus of members.
After the academy revamped itself in a bid to regain the trust of the Nobel Foundation, two laureates were named last year, with the 2018 prize going to Poland’s Olga Tokarczuk and the 2019 award to Austria’s Peter Handke.
This year the academy is likely to seek a more harmonious choice for the 10 million kronor (more than US $1.1 million) prize.
Authors often mentioned as contenders include Kenya’s Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Canadian poet Anne Carson and Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami.
On Monday, the Nobel Committee awarded the prize for physiology and medicine for discovering the liver-ravaging hepatitis C virus. Tuesday’s prize for physics honoured breakthroughs in understanding the mysteries of cosmic black holes, and the chemistry prize on Wednesday went to scientists behind a powerful gene-editing tool.