For what is perhaps the world’s stuffiest, most self-important, and—sure—rarefied cultural award, the Nobel Prize in Literature is also often quite funny. That a lot of people take it far too seriously has been the premise of the tens of thousands of words we have written about it, stretching back more than a decade.
Still, the best joke about the Nobel in those eleven years was one we didn’t write. In 2016, the Swedish Academy Academy awarded world literature’s most prestigious honor to Bob Dylan, who promptly did everything he could not to accept it. This was funny in part because we had predicted that Dylan would not win the prize—not that year, and not ever. But this couldn’t lay a glove on the bigger joke that Dylan had won at all. It was a lesson in humility that we’ve carried with us ever since: The Nobel Prize in Literature is always funnier than anything we could write about it.
It was a lesson we should have already learned. In 2007, cameras ambushed Doris Lessing outside her London home as she was coming back from grocery shopping. She had just won global literature’s biggest prize, the assembled journalists excitedly told her. “Oh Christ,” she responded. She had already won “every bloody one” of Europe’s prizes. The Nobel, she sighed, completed the “royal flush.”
Lessing was as expertly deadpan and awkward as the best of British comedy. It wasn’t entirely clear if she was irritated because she won the Nobel Prize, because she was impatient to put away her groceries, or because her house was surrounded by the worst and most obnoxious people on Earth (British journalists). What was clear, even then, was that this kind of thing likely would not happen again—anyone currently Laureate-worthy (even William Vollmann) would almost certainly carry a cellphone while shopping (even while doing the kind of shopping Vollman does). In any case, it was a great video—and one I thought would never be equaled, let alone surpassed, in the annals of Nobel announcements.
This video of Japanese fans reacting to the news that Haruki Murakami had—once more—gone un-Laureated on Thursday morning is just as perfect and every bit as funny. It may be even better:
Video: A Haruki Marukami mega fan reacts with sadness to the announcement that his favorite novelist did not win this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. In their haste to create an announcement sign, someone misspelled the name of the winner, Anne Carson. t.co/uip4EoL0uX
— Jeffrey J. Hall ???? (@mrjeffu) October 8, 2026An anguished man holds up his arms in genuine pain while desperately clinging to a sign attesting to his love for Murakami (and wearing his favorite author’s signature item of clothing—a T-shirt that is a little too loud). Then the camera pans to an older man wearing a ridiculous pink beret, sitting next to a younger one wearing a Forrest Gump t-shirt. Then, the camera cuts again, to a woman holding a white board containing the name of the winner of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature: “Ann Carson,” the Canadian poet. Her name is actually “Anne,” though that misspelling only pushes an already perfect video into the pantheon.
The torment, the stupid T-shirts, the sense of absolute, absurd devotion: It is exactly like a crowd scene you would see in the middle of a college football bowl game. It’s genuinely funny. This is what it’s all about. (It is also—down to the Forrest Gump shirt—exactly what Philip Roth went through every year in early October as he sat in his agent Andrew Wylie’s office at the crack of dawn waiting for a call that would never come.)
Despite our history of bad calls, we remain as certain as ever that Murakami will never win the Nobel Prize, and this video only makes us more convinced. The problem isn’t that Murakami writes exclusively to jazz on pristine 180 gram vinyl or that he does so surrounded by perfect, bespoke beechwood furniture. Nor is it that the Swedish Academy is biased against cat people (they prefer labradors) and jazz (they have penciled in Yung Lean for 2050’s Nobel), or that they do not appreciate the challenge of achieving truly al dente pasta (they only eat meatballs). The nonexistence of rich and rewarding friendships with women in Murakami’s work or its suffocating sterility may even be points in his favor.
The beautiful video of Murakami’s fans ripping up their (frankly ridiculous) T-shirts gets at the real problem: Murakami will never win because he’s in another tier of influence than practically every other “literary” novelist. The iteration of the Nobel Prize in Literature that has been in place since the scandal-plagued annus horribilis of 2018 is serious and refined and uninterested in fandom and mania. It is inarguable and unimpeachable. It does not approve of people rending their garments on behalf of their favorite novelist (who has, incidentally, published an entire book about his garments).
Carson, for what it’s worth, is inarguable and unimpeachable, a consummate Laureate for a Nobel Prize now exclusively bestowed on the consummate. The honorific attached to the work of the two scientists who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry a day earlier also applies to her writing: It is devoted to “solving the mystery of life’s asymmetry.” Abstract, intertextual, genre- and form-bending, Carson is technically a poet, though that term only goes so far. When Carson was informed by the Swedish Academy that she had won the Nobel Prize, she was at her home in Iceland, where she is a citizen. She told them she was there “listening to the wind.”
Writing about music may be like dancing about architecture, but listening to the wind is actually what Anne Carson has done over and over again in more than 20 works written across four decades that have been described as “poems,” “novels,” “plays,” and “librettos,” among other descriptors. But “Anne Carson listens to the wind” is closer to the truth, which is probably ineffable—or at least only capable of being described by Carson herself.
Take Nox, among her most famous works, which is a suite of interconnected poems published in an accordion-like fold-out box. The box is not a gimmick: It’s essential to the work itself, which is devoted to the death of her brother. (It is also really hard to describe without visual aids—specifically a box—so you’ll have to trust us.) Carson has always been committed to form—box-shaped and otherwise—but naturally she has other preoccupations: grief, longing, and, as Carson writes in The Gender of Sound, the way that patriarchal culture puts “a door on the female mouth.” That door, Carson writes, has been present “from antiquity to the present day,” which gets at another feature of her work, a deep and explicit interest in classical literature, and the way that it continues to reveal great continuities despite thousands of years of social upheaval.
Carson, if it’s not already clear, is an unusually tactile writer. This is true both literally (see the aforementioned box) and in a more expansive sense: In nearly all her work, Carson has shown an interest in getting beyond form and even language. When she says she is out there in Iceland listening to the wind, she’s being as honest as the wind herself—and not just because Iceland is among the windiest places in the world, windwise. (According to unconfirmed reports, Carson is currently in discussion with New Directions about the feasibility of packaging a new prose poem in a wooden box that will contain authentic wind from Hvannadalshnúkur. If the supply chain holds, look out for Hvannadalshnúrtúre this winter, retailing at $89.99, though that price may fluctuate based on the openness of the Strait of Hormuz.)
Carson’s whole deal—ruminative, form-bending, wind-obsessed—makes her an especially fitting winner in 2026, the year artificial intelligence entrenched itself in intellectual life and began (or continued, if you assume that James Patterson has had a prototype LLM churning out dozens of fast-paced thrillers since the 1990s—though, don’t worry, his collabs with Bill Clinton and Mr. Beast were all produced the old-fashioned way) to strangle book publishing. To present a thorough list of 2026 AI literary controversies I’d probably need to ask Claude for help, which would sort of undermine my point.
In any case, it’s already obvious that publishing has proven to be highly vulnerable to AI scams, deceptive writers, and corporate hacks trying to optimize and scrape the life out of literature. It will get worse before it gets better, which makes writing like Carson’s work particularly appealing. There’s no way Anne Carson, author of The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, is going to be captured by the machines or turned into a Hulu microriginal. Carson is not just averse to literary celebrity but reluctant to do any publicity at all, something that is practically heroic in the current environment—her reticence makes Doris Lessing look like Joyce Carol Oates. (Which isn’t to say that she’s averse to modernity. There are surpising flickers of contemporaneity in a lot of Carson’s work, and until her win this morning she was most infamous in 2026 for a London Review of Books ode to Rosalia.)
Like Lessing, Carson has her (wrong) detractors, and their ranks will certainly grow in the coming weeks. In a stinging 2024 piece in The Nation, the classicist and Odyssey translator (and The Odyssey hater) Emily Wilson compared Carson to two writers: the Instagram poet Rupi Kaur and the Hulu novelist Margaret Atwood. That is, to be fair, the kind of thing that I used to do when we wrote articles handicapping the Nobel betting odds every year, especially in that column’s later, more Don Rickles–infused era. As far as hating goes, one can only respect it. (“Zaniness”? OK, sure. we would have said her prose made Sigur Ros’s lyrics seem intelligible. And that her next book would be an improvement because it would contain no words at all—though it would be “contained” in a perfectly carved ebony box. And also probably something about the whole Rosalía thing.)
Maybe we’ve gotten soft, but we don’t really believe any of that. Zany or not, Carson is notable because she’s sui generis. They broke the mold when they made her. (Shattered Fagments of the Mold is currently on backorder. Each fragment comes packaged with a sliver of the other kind of mold, harvested from the fjords of Iceland. Cannot be moved across state lines.)
Both the lovers and the haters can agree that Anne Carson is an original, a macro one, even as the Nobel Prize in Literature itself has become increasingly predictable. As the Swedish journalist, novelist, and ace Nobel watcher Jens Lijenstrad noted to me Thursday morning, over the past ten years the prize has consistently rotated between men and women and Europeans. Bettors have noticed this, which is why Carson, Canadian-born and female, rocketed up the betting odds in the hours before the announcement. (Odds are next year’s winner will be a European man: Congratulations, Mircea Cărtărescu! And more importantly congratulations to his fans—when he wins you have my word that I’ll buy both of you shots.)
As the post-scandal years roll past, it’s becoming clearer that the Nobel Prize in Literature is now solely the province of a fairly narrow set of practitioners of high literature who possess a sterling reputation and attract modest sales. Not too long ago, you could count on some weird thrills and variations—a highbrow but still popular writer followed by a French litterateur whose novels depict a man who finds himself returning again and again to a woman he met once, during the war, when things were harder, but also simpler, when one could feel the tectonic shifts of history and the tobacco-stained breath of politics on the wind. There’s not so much of that going around these days. More than it’s ever been, the Nobel Prize is targeted to graduate students and booksellers, which is to say the unemployed and the underemployed, but also the broodily bespectacled.
That is not to say it has been without conflict. The decision to award Carson was controversial within the Swedish Academy, according to the Swedish literature podcast Gästabudet. While you should generally discount anything you hear from podcasts, unless the speaker is Bill Simmons and the subject is a Miramax film about poker from the late 1990s, I have heard similar rumors from Scandinavia, though they’ve all come secondhand and have to be qualified as “gossip.” That fractiousness, real or otherwise, isn’t especially surprising given the realities of the Prize, which can only be awarded when the majority of the 18-person Swedish Academy agrees on a candidate.
It seems likely next year’s Nobel will follow the pattern and be awarded to a man, most likely a European man. Still, the (rumored) infighting could mean that the winner will be a compromise candidate aimed at smoothing over internal divisions, which could point to a swerve, like when the then-unknown Abulrazak Gurnah won in 2021, or someone “safe,” though what that means in practice is anyone’s guess.
What next? Every fall, like clockwork, articles that should have been tweets pop-up bemoaning the fact that numerous great writers never won the Nobel Prize in Literature: Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, and Jorge Luis Borges all died un-Laureated, as did Philip Roth, if you’re into that kind of thing. These tired exhortations are often presented with a whiff of forbidden truth: Big Nobel is trying to conceal something important from you. The Nobel Prize in Literature is actually not a comprehensive prize for Best Book People, these articles insist.
Well, yes. There are many reasons why these writers didn’t win (in order: horny, goofy, horny, Jewish, horny, woman, Argentinian, Philip Roth), but above all they didn’t win because the Nobel has historically eschewed the concept of the “laundry list.” Way back in 1901 when the first Prize was awarded, everybody knew that Tolstoy was canonical, which is one reason why it was given to Sully Prudhomme, a melancholic French poet who lived in obscurity and died less than eight years after his selection as Literature’s Next Top Guy. If the Nobel has not always favored the esoteric, eccentric, and non-canonical over the canonical, it has at least attempted to balance the obvious and the surprising. To put it somewhat differently, it has often proceeded from the presumption that the literary canon is always in flux and that no one can be really sure which writers will be deemed important in 100 years time.
Today the Nobel seems trapped between its newfound consistency and its old-school tendency toward novelty, rewarding writers who fit the bill (even if they provoke controversy within the Academy) but still tend toward various kinds of marginality. For now that means no to Murakami and yes to Cărtărescu. Perennial betting favorite Can Xue will probably win in a couple of years and perennial betting favorite Salman Rushdie probably will not. Fair enough.
In 2023, after Jon Fosse won the Nobel, we noted that the Prize was “so back.” Two years later, after László Krasznahorkai won it, we opined that it was “boring now,” more or less for the same reasons that excited us when Fosse won. Like the Nobel, this column contains multitudes.
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