Who will win the Nobel Prize for literature, 2025?
One guess...
As for this year: I’m gonna guess the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh. There’s only been one Indian Nobel Laureate, the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, who won all the way back in 1913. Unless they’re saving room for Arundhati Roy in a few years (which they very well might be), the subcontinent is long overdue. And it’s not going to be Salman Rushdie (sorry!!). Ghosh writes both fiction and non-fiction, has won a bunch of other major prizes (but not too many), and his perspective on colonialism, the Opium Wars and their contemporary impact is just the kind of stuff that the committee loves. He’s outspoken about the BJP, but lives abroad so isn’t too muddled up in politics. He’d be perfect – but now that I’ve said it, he’s been taken off the list. My apologies to him and his family.
From Mathilde Montpetit in The Berliner. I have no ideas myself and don’t follow this topic too closely, but this was an interesting piece. She says she has predicted the past three winners.
Not a bad prediction at all; I could easily see it. His reputation is very high right now. In addition to awarding someone from the subcontinent, it would also be a climate change pick, which I could see them wanting to do.
The winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in recent years is usually someone I have never heard of until then. Assuming the Committee reads more literature than I do, I expect that to happen again. So it won't be Margaret Atwood, even though she will die soon, and only living authors are given the Prize.