In just a few days, the Nobel committee will announce the winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize for Literature. They will join an elite group of writers from around the world, and a small selection of those writers who we have read, reviewed, and classified as members of Nobel FC: The only Fantasy Football team where the Fantasy is that these people would ever play.

I’ll try to read the author in question as soon as I can, and write their post by the beginning of November, but I wanted to take a moment to consider who will be joining this august group.

How does the “draft” work

In Professional Sports there are annual “drafts” where teams select from a collection of players not yet in the league. They study and examine their abilities, debate the best choice, and then “draft” someone to become a part of their organization.

The Nobel Prize is a little like that. The “Team” in question is the Swedish Academy (of Literature). They collection of players not yet in the league is literally everyone on earth, who has yet to be awarded the Nobel, is living, and who wrote something. (Literally, they have awarded a prime minister for stirring speech writing, and a folk singer for his lyrics.)

That’s a big field so they take in nominations from other Academies of Literature around the world, professors of universities, living laureates, and presidents of Authors’ guilds. That is still a very big field so they narrow it down to five finalists: study and examine the writers abilities, debate the best choice and then “award” someone the Prize.

This process has been a little controversial over the years. After all, why do the Swedes get the final vote? (Alfred Nobel said so) Does the fact that the Swedish Academy is mostly old, white, male, Europeans explain the fact that most of the laureates in history have been old, white, male Europeans? (Yes) Will they try to be more inclusive in the future? (Yes, though they kind of had to after a pretty ugly scandal).

So Who Could be “Drafted” This Year?

We don’t know the top 5 candidates, or even the top 100 candidates who got nominated, and we won’t for another 50 years (long after the internet, including this post becomes a time capsule for aliens). But we have a list of likely candidates from gamblers and prognosticators. (I’ll toss out 11 here)

The leading favorites are Can Xue, a Chinese author who frequently challenges the increasingly authoritarian establishment in Beijing, and Haruki Murakami, a Japanese writer (and one of my wife’s absolute favorites) who writes book that have a following in seemingly every country on earth. However, given that the Nobel likes writers who court a little political controversy, Murakami seems less likely than Xue. It’s also been more than 10 years since an Asian Writer was awarded the prize, so you could argue that Xue/Murakami would get an overdue award.

Of the last ten laureates 4 have been from Western Anglophile countries, and 2 have been French. So other plausible candidates like American Thomas Pynchon, Global Indian/Brit/American Salman Rushdie, Canadian Anne Carson and Australian Gerald Murnane and Frenchman Pierre Michon seem to be plausible if the Academy doesn’t try to break from it’s old habits of just cycling through the West’s heaviest hitters. (YAY FOR HEGEMONY!)

If they wanted to award a Western literary heavyweight but NOT someone who writes in a frequently awarded language, then they could consider Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse, or Romanian novelist Mircea Cartarescu. Then again they have given out 3 awards to similar writers in the past ten years, all of whom were political, but one of whom (Austrian Peter Handke) had massive PR blowback due to his excuses for genocidal dictators.

Beyond Europe and Asia, the oddsmakers and the pundits don’t have many options. Perennial contender Ngui wa Thiong’o of Kenya looks to represent Subsaharan Africa, while Mexican poet Homero Aridjis is judged the best bet from Latin America (an area of the world not awarded since 2010)

Analysis: Who will it be? Who should it be?

In articles analysing a team’s draft-day decisions, writers look at two things. What they think the team leaders will do, and what the author themselves would do if they had a chance.

Having already read books by Murakami and Rushdie, I read a few well-recommended lines from the other nine and came up with this analysis.

The Academy Will Pick

The Swedish Academy tends not to prioritize the best selling or most widely acclaimed author available, they prefer those who have something artistic to offer in their work and especially if they have something beyond the purely personal to uncover. At times that leads them to revel in awarding obscure writers, and in the last three years, awarding more diverse picks.

So I think they will pick: Can Xue. I only read very brief exceprts from her work…but even that seemed weird and obtuse. Critics claim her work is often plotless, but that’s not a negative in the hands of the Nobel Committee. She’s got art, she’s got style, she’s got a point of view. She’s got to be the favorite.

Honorable mentions: John Fosse, Mircera Cartarescu, Homero Aridjis.

I Would Pick

If left up to me, I would try to award a writer from outside the common-sphere of Nobel winners (ie Western Europe/America and white men). A more diverse writer with a point of view that connects to the wider world would be the ideal for me. Artistry is something I think lies in the eye of the beholder, so better to be clear than artful in my eyes.

So I would pick: Homero Aridjis. Admittedly, I only looked at four of his poems, but he evokes a universality similar to Paz and Neruda, while also considering the broader scope of history and nature–which might suit the climate change conscious Academy/myself to boot.

Honorable Mentions: Salman Rushdie (I still think of him as an Indian writer despite his increasingly American identity), Ngui wa Thiong’o, Louise Erdrich (totally left field pick, I also wanted to offer a woman of color)

Who would you pick?

Leave a comment below, please, even alien overlords, comment with your pick.

Next Time…I rush to judgement on whomever our winner is Jon Fosse

Jon Fosse is your 2023 Nobel Laureate.

I’m awarding myself 2 Nonsense points (1 if they’re on the 11, 2 if they’re in my Honorable mentions, 5 if I actually call it…see how long it takes me to get to 11)

It is my habit to take on foolish and ill advised ideas blending things I love. It’s why there’s a collage of Economist covers in my classroom, and why I use my old baseball card collection as bookmarks.

That’s my way of introducing a new and extremely niche idea of sharing lessons that connect classic literature to football and football to classic literature.

Here’s how it will work: I’ll read some of the works of a writer who has won the Nobel Prize in Literature (it may seem arbitrary, but it’s a short hand of world-wide writers who inspire people the same way soccer stars can).

We’ll meet the writer and see what connection–if any–they have to soccer

We’ll look at one or two of their famous pieces and write a bit about their lessons and themes.

We’ll connect the themes from the work to our lives and to the things we’ve been seeing on the pitch.

And finally we’ll slot the writer into a spot on the pitch 1-Goalkeeper to 11-Striker to create a silly little team (possibly even with photoshop if I can figure it out). Hopefully we’ll see enough to create a full squad (maybe more given the long history of the award).

For now I’m just aiming to do this six times a year (writing about the winners 100, 80, 60, 40, and 20 years ago, as well as this year’s honoree when they are announced in October). If time allows I’ll work on the ones from before 100 years ago, but I’m trying to do a lot of writing and reading, so let’s just settle down our expectations eh?

I’ll drop our first installment on the first of March.