Enrique Vila-Matas, among the favorites to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature

BarcelonaThere's just under a month left until the Swedish Academy announces the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. As every year, betting houses like Ladbrokes are already starting to see some names pop up, including some regulars like Haruki Murakami and Thomas Pynchon, and more recently Can Xue and László Krasznahorkai. For now, one of this year's surprises is that Enrique Vila-Matas (Barcelona, ​​​​1948) appears among the ten names with the greatest chances of receiving the literary award most prestigious in the world.

The author of Bartleby and Company (Anagrama, 2000) and Paris never ends (Anagrama, 2003) presented his latest novel a few months ago, Camera obscura cannon (Seix Barral, 2025), in which an android invites us to delve into 48 hours of obsessive writing and the creation of a literary canon compiled from randomly selected fragments of authors such as Robert Walser, Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, and Carlo Emilio Gad. Vila-Matas's work can be read in almost 40 languages, and he has received numerous international awards, such as the Rómulo Gallegos Prize and the FIL Award at the Guadalajara Book Fair.

Today, Vila-Matas is in eighth place among the authors most highly rated in the betting to win the Nobel Prize for Literature on October 9th. As last year, at the top of the list is the Chinese narrator Can Xue—whose work can be read in Catalan thanks to Gata Maula, in the splendid compilation The Ballad of the Mountain Birds, translated by Eulàlia Jardí–, followed by the Hungarian László Krasznahorkai, who is planning to visit Barcelona in October coinciding with the Kosmopolis festival, and who has just published one of his best novels, Satanic Tango, in Crater, in a version by Carlos Dachs. The veteran Pierre Michon, who has recently made his name known J écris the Iliad, is in third position, followed by the Japanese Haruki Murakami and the Romanian Mircea Cartarescu, known for novels such as Solenoid. Before Vila-Matas there are still two other names: that of the American Thomas Pynchon –who this autumn publishes the novel Shadow ticket– and that of the Norwegian Carl Frode Tiller, perhaps the most unexpected name on the list, about whom we were able to read a few years ago Look for thanks to Sakhalin.