Haruki Murakami and Philip Roth Among Favorites for the Nobel Prize in Literature

The Swedish Academy is set to announce the winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday, October 8, at 1pm local time in Stockholm. This year there were 198 nominations, including 36 authors who have never been nominated before. The members of the Nobel Committee for Literature have been studying the works of five authors, a list they whittled down from the 198 nominations.

The favorites to take the prize, according to betting firm Ladbrokes, are Belarusian Svetlana Aleksijevitj, Japanese Haruki Murakami, Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Norwegian Jon Fosse, and Americans Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth. Another of this years betting favorites is Korean poet Ko Un, whose odds have shifted from 50/1 to 14/1. The 112th Laureate will join the ranks of Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez, Tomas Tranströmer, and Derek Walcott. Although the prize is considered a great honor and comes with the generous sum of 8 million Swedish Kronor ($971 970), the list of literary greats snubbed by the Swedish Academy is as impressive as the list of the prize recipients.

Among the qualified nominators for the prize are members of the Swedish Academy, professors of linguistics or literature at universities and university colleges, and previous Nobel Laureates in Literature.

The 2015 Nobel season began on Monday with the winner in medicine, and continues today with the Nobel Prize in Physics. On Wednesday the winner in chemistry will be revealed, followed by the literature winner on Thursday, and lastly, on Friday the Nobel Peace Prize winner will be announced.