Will Murakami Win The Nobel Prize?
Once again, Murakami is one of the favourite to win this prestigious prize.
We are about one week away from the 2023 Nobel Prizes being announced and as usual Haruki Murakami is one of the favourites for the Literature Prize.
On the Nobel Prize website, it says that the awards will be given out between 2nd and 9th October, with the Literature Prize announced on 5th October. It is famously difficult to predict who will win and the results are a well-kept secret.
According to various betting websites, the favourite is Can Xue at 4-1 or 5-1 (depending on where you bet) with Murakami coming in at either 14-1 or 15-1.
These odds put him in the top ten, a place he has occupied for much of the last few decades. Every year, it seems, there is substantial talk of it being “Murakami’s year.” Sadly, though, he has never been named the winner.
What would it take for Murakami to win the award in 2023?
According to Ellen Mattson, who helps decide the winner, the process ultimately comes down to quality:
It’s all about quality. Literary quality, of course. The winner needs to be someone who writes excellent literature, someone who you feel when you read that there’s some kind of a power, a development that lasts through books, all of their books. But the world is full of very good, excellent writers, and you need something more to be a laureate. It’s very difficult to explain what that is. It’s something you’re born with, I think. The romantics would call it a divine spark. For me, it’s a voice that I hear in the writing that I find within this particular writer’s work and nowhere else. It’s very difficult to explain what it is, but I always know when I find it. It’s something you’re born with. A talent that gives that extra dimension to that particular writer’s work.
That’s all very subjective, of course. Indeed, when one reads more into the criteria, one finds it increasingly vague. Essentially, the award must go to a living author and is probably determined according to their whole body of work rather than a single recent publication. However, authors can in certain exceptional circumstances be awarded because of a single book.
This of course puts Murakami in good standing. Although his recent novels have been divisive, he certainly has a number of highly acclaimed works from throughout his career and this explains why he has been a perpetual favourite for the award.
Although Murakami has long been mentioned as a potential winner, we do not know for sure that he has ever been shortlisted. These names (five are selected each year) are kept a closely guarded secret for fifty years, so if he does not win then we will have to wait a long time to find out.
For his part, Murakami professes not to care. In his recent book, Novelist as Vocation, he talked about his lack of interest in awards. After citing one of his heroes, Raymond Chandler, who scoffed at the Nobel Prize for Literature, Murakami wrote:
At the risk of stating the obvious, it is literary works that last, not literary prizes. I doubt many can tell you who won the Akutagawa Prize two years ago, or the Nobel Prize winner three years back. Can you? Truly great works that have stood the test of time, on the other hand, are lodged in our memory forever. Was Ernest Hemingway a Nobel Prize winner? (He was.) How about Jorge Luis Borges? (Was he? Who gives a damn?) A literary prize can turn the spotlight on a particular work, but it can’t breathe life into it. It’s that simple.
He goes on to say that he wants no part even in giving out prizes and explains:
The reason is a simple one—I am just too much of an individualist. I am a person with a fixed vision and a fixed process for giving that vision shape.
Well, if Murakami doesn’t care, then that’s fine. But as a fan of his work, I certainly hope that he gets the award and I look forward to hearing the speech he gives when collecting it.