Could a Russian win the Nobel Prize this year?

It will be a European this year, that’s culture writer Carsten Palmer Schale’s gut feeling. Every year he predicts which author will receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in the cultural magazine Opulens. He was right about Abdulrazak Gurnah in 2021 and named Annie Ernaux as one of the three writers he most believed in last year.

This year his guess is Mircea Cartarescu from Romania.

— He is an Eastern European writer, as is Peter Nadas – they are both great. Nadas is a fine storyteller and stylist, but Cartarescu is also extremely complex and modern.

Personally, Carsten Palmer Schale is hoping for Ngugi wa Thiong’o from Kenya.

— He was a famous writer already 50 years ago. Then he wrote in English and then he switched to writing in tribal languages. I think he deserves the award, he is also an African writer in a different sense than Gurnah, who lived for a long time in Britain.

The Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o is again mentioned as a possible candidate. Archive image. For the ambiguity of literature

Ngugi wa Thiong’o is one of the overseas writers who have been highlighted for years, alongside names such as Jamaica Kincaid, Nuruddin Farah and Salman Rushdie. Sydsvenskan culture manager Ida Ölmendal is hoping for the author of “The Satanic Verses”. Maybe it’s because she’s been reading him this year, she thinks.

But after living with death threats for large parts of his life, Salman Rushdie was attacked last year during a performance in New York, and Ida Ölmedal states that his writing is in time.

— I don’t know if the Nobel Prize has to do it. But I thought it would be fun if he got it. It has something to do with literature’s possibility of being ambiguous, which is so threatened, she says, and thinks that Rushdie is also relevant in view of the uprising in Iran and that there is generally more talk about banned literature.

But Carsten Palmer Schale doesn’t think a writer from outside Europe will get it this year.

— I also don’t think that any of several possible female French women will get it after Ernaux. If you weigh one with the other against the third, I think it will be a European who writes in different genres, he says and also mentions Norwegian Jon Fosse.

Ulitskaja ruled out?

Per Bergström at Ramus publishing house thinks there has been a certain overestimation of English authors in recent years. His personal favorite is Hungarian László Krasznahorkai.

— He has a narrative universe of his own which is both symptomatic of some form of post-communist, Eastern European intelligent storytelling, but it is also filled with a dark and black humour.

The question is whether a Nobel Prize for a Russian or Ukrainian author is completely out of the question? Per Bergström doesn’t think so, because Russian- and Ukrainian-language literature has been both promoted and translated to a greater extent since the war in Ukraine began.

Rasmus Landström, literary editor at Aftonbladet, believes that only someone “super oppositional” like Michail Shishkin or the often tipped Ljudmila Ulitskaja could get it.

— But I don’t think that the Nobel Committee follows the economic conditions surrounding the war and adapts accordingly, and I think that’s good, I don’t think the Nobel Prize should work that way, even though I absolutely think it can be a political prize.

Salman Rushdie lost the sight of one eye in the attack last year. Stock photography. Relevant science fiction

Rasmus Landström himself has been hoping for a couple of years for Kim Stanley Robinson, who writes science fiction. No purely science fiction writer has received the prize yet, Landström underlines, although he lists other writers who have “dipped their toe into the genre”, including Kazuo Ishiguro and Doris Lessing.

— Kim Stanley Robinson puts the environment in which people find themselves, the climate and the weather at the center of literature in a way that I have not seen any writer do before, so I think he is extremely relevant to our time.