Vauhini Vara: The Evolution of Nobel Prize Betting
According to the British betting company Ladbrokes, here are the writers who, as of Wednesday morning, had the best chance of winning the Nobel Prize in Literature: the Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (his odds are seven-to-two), the Japanese novelist and short-story writer Haruki Murakami (nine-to-two), and the Belarusian journalist Svetlana Aleksijevitj (six-to-one). They’re followed by the Syrian poet known as Adonis, the Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare, and the French novelist Patrick Modiano (tied, at ten-to-one).
For the past ten years, Ladbrokes has been taking bets on who will win the prize, which will be announced on Thursday morning. Nobel Prize betting falls within the broader category of novelty betting; other firms, like Paddy Power, also lay odds on the literature prize—and on the peace prize as well—but Ladbrokes is perhaps the best known of them. The task of a Nobel Prize bookmaker is especially imprecise. With football and horse races, the odds-setter has a great deal of data to analyze: a competitor’s past performance, injury reports, the expected weather. But the Nobel selection process is notoriously difficult to track.
When Alfred Nobel laid the ground for the prize, in 1895, he specified that the literature prize be chosen by the Swedish Academy, one of the Royal Academies founded by King Gustav III in the seventeen-hundreds. This academy consists of eighteen prominent Swedish literary figures—today they’re writers, linguists, scholars, and other luminaries. For this year’s prize, the academy considered two hundred and ten nominations from prominent literary figures around the world; thirty-six of the authors are first-time nominees. Beyond these details, no one knows much about the names. The deliberations of the committee are especially secretive.
In 2011, a few days before that year’s award was announced, a reporter from Bloomberg asked a man whom it identified as Magnus Puke, the “Nordic Sports and Novelty Odds Compiler” at Ladbrokes, how he set odds for the prize given the absence of information. Puke, who, according to Bloomberg, “writes love poetry in his spare time,” generally came up with his list of potential winners by “working literary contacts, hanging out in online forums and keeping an eye on Twitter.” (That year, Ngũgĩ was on his list but not particularly high. “The vibe is that this is not Africa’s year,” Puke said, and he was right: the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer won.)
Alex Donohue, a spokesman for Ladbrokes, told me that Puke has “moved elsewhere and has passed the baton to a colleague who uses very similar methods.” Donohue didn’t identify the colleague but called him “an intellectual.” He said Ngũgĩ’s move to the top of the list—displacing Murakami, last year’s favorite—was the result of a “steady stream of bets” for him. “Betting is all about supply and demand,” he explained. “The odds for any given contender will shorten in the face of plenty of support for them to win.”
Despite the academy’s secretiveness, it’s not out of the question that those betting for Ngũgĩ have inside information or, in any case, solid clues: last year, as the award announcement approached, Alice Munro became the second-favorite in Ladbrokes betting, after Murakami, in what the Guardian described as an “eleventh-hour leap”; she ended up winning.
Relatively speaking, Ladbrokes doesn’t make a lot of money from bets on the Nobel Prize. Donohue wouldn’t tell me how much revenue it gets from the category (“Revenue depends on the result!”), but, according to the Wall Street Journal, the company accepts about fifty thousand pounds in bets on the prize in literature, compared with two-to-three million pounds each for high-profile soccer matches and five million pounds from last month’s referendum on Scottish independence. Still, the betting gets Ladbrokes and other firms outsized attention in the mainstream press. This year, the Ladbrokes Nobel odds have gotten coverage from the Guardian, the Times, and the Wall Street Journal (on Murakami: “Over the past 24 hours, it appears that the Japanese writer—who has chronicled how he took up marathon-running as an adult—may be in the race of his life”), among others.
This publicity appears to be doing some good for Ladbrokes: according to Donohue, the total amount wagered on the literature prize has increased fivefold since Ladbrokes started taking bets on it. (He didn’t give underlying figures.) When I asked why Ladbrokes takes bets on the literature category but not the other Nobel prizes, Donohue said that it “seems to be the category above all others to capture bettors’ imaginations.”
So does the odds-making—and the media attention that results from it—have an impact on authors’ sales? Paul Bogaards, an executive vice-president at Knopf, which publishes Murakami in the U.S., told me in an e-mail that, when someone wins the Nobel Prize, “that does change everything”; when someone is “on the list” of possible winners, Knopf readies itself by checking inventories and reprint times for that author so it can be ready to “speed these books to market.” But getting to the top of the oddsmakers’ list doesn’t translate into sales, he said: “The only people who make money on Nobel Prize in literature betting are the odds makers themselves.”