Nobel Prize 2012: What are the Odds?

UPDATE: Mo Yan announced as winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature: "who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary".

Announcement of the Laureate of the Nobel Prize
in Literature 2008 at the Swedish Academy
in Stockholm by Horace Engdahl

 Every year, the on-line bookie site, Ladbrokes offers odds on the Nobel Prize for Lit. This year at this writing, Haruki Murakami leads all likely award winners at 7-1 odds. Surprisingly, song writing icon Bob Dylan is a close second at 10-1. Next is the oft banned Chinese novelist, Mo Yan (Red Sorghum), then Cees Nooteboom, the Dutch novelist poet and travel writer.

So who will it be this year? Will the American Philip Roth (16-1) finally be recognized? Or is this Italian novelist, Dacia Maraini's (16-1) year to shine? What about Salman Rushdie (66-1), will he ever win a Nobel? And last on the list at 500-1 sits E.L. James, the luckiest author in the world. Last year's winner was the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer, who if memory serves was near the top of the Ladbrokes list for a few years running.

If I had to place a bet, my money would go on Umberto Eco, who is currently buried back in the pack at 25-1. Eco is an eighty-year-old veteran Italian author and professor of Semiotics whose latest release, The Prague Cemetery, is a complex character study about among other things, the genesis of the infamous hoax known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He has written both critically acclaimed and popular work such as. The Name of the Rose and  Foucault's Pendulum.

So, who is your choice? Leave a comment.