Report: Canadian poet Anne Carson wins Nobel prize in literature 2026 – as it happened

A report from The Guardian — Culture focuses on “Report: Canadian poet Anne Carson wins Nobel prize in literature 2026 – as it happened” and sets out the main development contained in the supplied source material.

This live blog is now closed, you can read more on this story here: Full story: Anne Carson wins Nobel prize in literature Is Can Xue becoming the new Haruki Murakami ? The report also notes that The Japanese literary superstar has for so long been a favourite to win a Nobel without actually winning one that people in the literature industry have started to talk of the “Murakami curse”. But Chinese experimental writer Can Xue too is starting to follow that pattern. A bookies’ top favourite in 2018, 2019, 2023, 2024 and 2025, she’s again topping runners and riders lists this year. Could the pre-announcement hype in itself count against her winning? The Swedish Academy is clearly a self-aware kind of oracle, unhappy to see its choices as determined by outside forces. Last year’s laureate László Krasznahorkai may have been Ladbrokes’ favourite (alongside Can Xue), but bookies correctly predicting the winner is a once-in-a-decade occurrence. The last time it happened ahead of that was with Svetlana Alexievich in 2015, Ladbrokes’ clear favourite at 3/1 odds. Yet while the Academy certainly likes being seen as unpredictable, that’s not to say that it actually is. The largest literary accolade in the world is evidently engaged in a constant process of re-adjusting the perceived imbalances in its list of laureates. Over the last two decades it has done so in terms of gender, with eight women and 12 men, alternating since 2017, and in terms of crude geography, with 10 winners from western Europe and 10 from the rest of the world. following a Norwegian man in 2023, a South Korean wom

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