Betting on a Nobel Winner

October 1, 2013, The New York Times 

By VICTOR MATHER

Right - Andreu Dalmau/European Pressphoto AgencyHaruki Murakami in 2009.

Compared to, say, the Academy Awards or the Booker Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature is shrouded in mystery. There is no list of nominees. Even the date of the announcement is kept secret. So how do bookmakers every year confidently put forward a list of odds for who will win the prize?
Ladbrokes, one of Britain’s biggest betting firms, this year is offering odds on more than 100 writers, including Haruki Murakami, the 3-1 favorite, Joyce Carol Oates and Alice Munro, as well as more unlikely hopefuls like the Filipino novelist F. Sionil José and the Finnish author Gosta Agren.

The odds list is released each summer after research by a group of specialists, said Alex Donohue, a Ladbrokes spokesman. Sadly, that research does not include holing up in a back office and reading hundreds of great works of international literature. Instead, Mr. Donohue said, oddsmakers “take the temperature of the literary world at the moment,” scouring blogs and newspapers to see which authors are getting attention.

Because the Nobel Prize committee does not release a short list, “the release of the odds list is an event in itself,” Mr. Donohue said. For those in the literary world eager for a hint of whom the winner might be, the odds essentially become the de facto list of nominees, which has not gone unnoticed.

As bets are made, the odds are adjusted accordingly. For example, this year, the Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse was initially listed at 100-1. After bets began coming in on him, his price shortened, and he is now among the favorites at 14-1.

Of course there is no guarantee that bettors know a thing. Last year, a spate of articles speculating that Bob Dylan would win the prize caused his odds to fall dramatically. That change in price in turn sparked more articles, and suddenly Dylan became a hot tip to win. He did not.
But though the literati are excited to speculate on the winner, they seem to be a bit more risk averse than football or tennis bettors. The average bet, Mr. Donohue said, is only 5 to 10 pounds.