Enrique Vila-Matas appears again among the favorites for the Nobel Prize in Literature
Can Xue, Haruki Murakami and Gerald Murnane head the lists of the main betting houses, followed very closely by the author of 'Bartleby and Co.'
BarcelonaEnrique Vila-Matas (Barcelona, 1948) did not take home the million euros from the Aena prize a few months ago, but he is a firm candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, which will be announced on October 8th at one in the afternoon and has, in addition to a similar endowment, incomparable prestige.
The author of Bartleby and Company (Anagrama, 2000), Camera Obscura Canon (Seix Barral, 2025) and about thirty other novels and short story collections currently appears in the sixth position of the two most important betting houses, Ladbrokes and Bethard. It is the second consecutive year that Vila-Matas's name has consolidated among the ten candidates with the most bettors, and this year he is in a better position than last year, when he occupied the eighth spot.
The 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature went to the Hungarian László Krasznahorkai, "contemporary master of the apocalypse", who occupied the second position in the betting. The first was the Chinese narrator Can Xue, who this 2026 is once again leading the bets: in Catalan, she inaugurated the catalog of the Gata Maula publishing house with the short story collection The Ballad of the Mountain Birds (2025). Can Xue is followed by an eternal candidate for the award, the Japanese Haruki Murakami –well known thanks to novels such as Norwegian Wood (1987) and 1Q84 (2009), in Catalan at Empúries– and the veteran Australian author Gerald Murnane (Coburg, 1939), whose work The Plains can be read in Catalan published by Minúscula.
After Murnane, in the betting we find the enigmatic American novelist Thomas Pynchon (Long Island, 1937), the Mexican Cristina Rivera Garza (Matamoros, 1964), author of Liliana's Invincible Summer (Literatura Random House, 2021), in which she recounted the murder of her sister while she was studying at university, and Enrique Vila-Matas.
The Barcelona author has been translated into nearly 40 languages and has won awards such as the Herralde (2002), the Médicis (2003), the Formentor (2014) and the National Culture Prize of the Generalitat (2016). After Enrique Vila-Matas, the seventh place is occupied by the Portuguese Lídia Jorge (Boliqueime, 1946); the eighth, the Russian narrator Liudmila Ulitskaya (Bashkortostan, 1943); the ninth, the Canadian Margaret Atwood (Ottawa, 1939), and the tenth, the French novelist Michel Houellebecq (Saint-Pierre, 1956), author of Platform (2001) and Submission (2015).
From the eleventh position in the betting odds there are candidates such as the Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgård (Oslo, 1968), the Congolese Alain Mabanckou (Pointe-Noire, 1966), the Irishman Colm Tóibín (Enniscorthy, 1955) and the Argentine César Aira (Coronel Pringles, 1949).