Nobel Prize countdown

       Last I checked, the Nobel Prize in Literature page still had a blank in the space for specifying: "2014 Literature Prize will be announced at the earliest in:"; if the Swedish Academy has decided to announce the winner this Thursday they'll let us know today -- but it's much more likely that the announcement will only come next Thursday (or later). Not only would a 2 October announcement not fit in with that nice banner the Nobel organization has, promising the prizes will be announced between 6 and 13 October, but as the Swedish Academy's pointman Peter Englund notes at his weblog, a fair number of Nobel-deciding academicians (including him) have been busy this weekend at the Göteborg Book Fair -- leaving them little time for deliberations.
       So presumably they'll only really be getting down to business today, trying to settle on a winner from their ca. five-author strong list of finalists in time to reveal the winner next week.
       So for now it's premature to wonder about the winner -- they very likely haven't settled on one yet. There is, however, room and reason to speculate on what authors are left in the running. Most years, the bookies' favorites are a pretty good indicator -- the future winner tends to be one of the top five or so (so also Alice Munro last year, even a month before the anouncement came).
       So what are the current odds ? Books have been disappointingly limited this year -- but here the ones of interest:

• Ladbrokes
• PaddyPower
• Unibet

       So Murakami Haruki is the universal favorite, at 5/1 or so, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o the universal second favorite, right behind.
       The big movers in recent weeks:

• At Ladbrokes (2 September v. 28 September): Ngũgĩ (10/1 to 5/1); Fosse (25/1 to 12/1)
• At PaddyPower (2 September v. 28 September): no significant movement
• At Unibet (8 September v. 28 September): Murakami (6/1/ to 4.5/1) jumps ahead of Ngũgĩ (5/1); Fosse (30/1 to 18/1)

       A few more names that pop out:

• Don Paterson (25/1 at Unibet and 20/1 at Paddy Power; not listed at Ladbrokes) is a new-name-out-of nowhere (which I find hard to take very seriously, but it's plausible that he was nominated, and maybe he somehow made the shortlist).
• Ismail Kadare, who wasn't listed anywhere at the start of trading but now figures at Unibet at a healthy 8/1 (but still isn't listed at the other two).
• Richard Ford, another author added to the Unibet line-up (but not the other two), at a decent 20/1.

       Kadare is a name that has to be taken seriously, and his popping up so high on the (Swedish-based) Unibet list makes him this year's likeliest leaked-shortlist-candidate.
       A few of the other authors with short(ish) odds seem like harder sells this year: Joyce Carol Oates (another English-writing North American woman ? but her Karthago has just come out in Swedish ...), while authors including Adonis, Amos Oz, and Svetlana Alexievich would surely be seen as the Swedish Academy making (too powerful ?) a political statement.

       More of my own speculation to follow in the days/week to come .....

       Meanwhile, speculation and discussion continues at messageboards, notably at the World Literature Forum and the Fictional Woods.

       (At Thomson Reuters' ScienceWatch they offer Nobel predictions -- but, alas, not in the Literature category.)