Nobel Foundation prepares to announce literature prize

Booker Prize winners among 2008 contenders

3 October 2008

The Nobel Foundation in Stockholm stated today (3 October 2008) that it will announce the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature on 9 October 2008.

Speculation has already begun on this year's winner and Ladbrokes has made Italian scholar and journalist Claudio Magris the favourite 3-1 odds, followed closely by the Syrian poet Adonis, Israel's Amos Oz, contender for the Man Booker International in 2007, and American novelist Joyce Carol Oates.

Booker Prize winners Margaret Atwood, John Banville, A.S. Byatt, Peter Carey, Ian McEwan, Michael Ondaatje and Salman Rushdie have also been given odds.

Doris Lessing, shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times and contender for the Man Booker International in 2005 and 2007, was last year's winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Since 1901 the Nobel Prize has been awarded for achievements in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and for peace.  The very first Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the French poet and philosopher Sully Prudhomme.  

The Man Booker Prize Fiction at its finest