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 make headlines, including some regulars like Haruki Murakami and Thomas Pynchon, as well as newer ones like Can Xue and László Krasznahorkai. So far, 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 takes us through 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 Gadda. Vila-Matas's work can be read in almost 40 languages and has received numerous international awards such as the Rómulo Gallegos Prize and the FIL Award at the Guadalajara Book Fair.

Today, Vila-Matas is ranked eighth among the most highly rated authors in the odds to win the Nobel Prize for Literature on October 9. As last year, leading the list is the Chinese novelist Can Xue—whose work can be read in Catalan thanks to Gata Maula and the splendid compilation The Ballad of the Mountain Birds, translated by Eulàlia Jardí, followed by the Hungarian László Krasznahorkai, who is due 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 will publish a novel this autumn, Shadow ticket- and 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.