Yesterday I noted the breaking news of the possible First indications of some Nobel leakage ? as Ladbrokes suspended Nobel Prize betting on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o.
At The Atlantic Wire Alexander Nazaryan took a closer look at what happened, wondering Will the Nobel Prize for Literature Go to Kenya's Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o ?
Helpfully, he got some feedback from Ladbrokes press representative Alex Donohue, who did confirm that they suspend betting when there is: "a sudden large bet or bets" (a trigger point that I'm guessing isn't that high in this novelty-bet area).
More significantly:
Mind you, the bookies don't have to move the odds based on the bets that are placed, but it's the prudent (and typical) thing to do: the odds should be in line with how punters rate contenders' chances, whether in a horse or a Nobel race. So ... odd, that.
Still, I now again lean more towards Ngũgĩ (and Oates) being among the (presumably) five finalists than not.
One more point of small, indirect interest: Ngũgĩ was in the house -- well, in the Stockholm Kulturhuset (etc.) -- right around the time this spring when they were winnowing down the list of contenders. He got good media attention, which the Swedish Academy surely also registered -- and it probably couldn't have hurt as far as his name being in play for the long/shortlist decisions. (I take it as a given that he was one of the 195 authors they were considering; he's among the few dozen that are a pretty safe bet of having at least been proposed every recent time around). Sure, maybe the academicians want to be contrary and pick an obscurer sub-Saharan representative (Ayi Kwei Armah, I keep saying; Ayi Kwei Armah ...), but nobody fits the winner-bill as well as Ngũgĩ (with his writing in Gikuyu the trump card -- well, beside the actual works themselves).
Donohue dropped a bombshell: one of the "decent bets" -- we think "decent" is a British euphemism for "huge" -- came "from a Swedish customer."All this would seem to support the initial inference -- that someone well-placed has good reason to believe Ngũgĩ is a finalist. The only thing that speaks against it: despite all this, when betting re-opened on Ngũgĩ it was -- as it still is as I write this -- at 50/1. I.e. they didn't move the odds.
Mind you, the bookies don't have to move the odds based on the bets that are placed, but it's the prudent (and typical) thing to do: the odds should be in line with how punters rate contenders' chances, whether in a horse or a Nobel race. So ... odd, that.
Still, I now again lean more towards Ngũgĩ (and Oates) being among the (presumably) five finalists than not.
One more point of small, indirect interest: Ngũgĩ was in the house -- well, in the Stockholm Kulturhuset (etc.) -- right around the time this spring when they were winnowing down the list of contenders. He got good media attention, which the Swedish Academy surely also registered -- and it probably couldn't have hurt as far as his name being in play for the long/shortlist decisions. (I take it as a given that he was one of the 195 authors they were considering; he's among the few dozen that are a pretty safe bet of having at least been proposed every recent time around). Sure, maybe the academicians want to be contrary and pick an obscurer sub-Saharan representative (Ayi Kwei Armah, I keep saying; Ayi Kwei Armah ...), but nobody fits the winner-bill as well as Ngũgĩ (with his writing in Gikuyu the trump card -- well, beside the actual works themselves).