Nobel Prize in Literature, announcement on October 8: no official list of candidates

The 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced on Thursday, October 8 at 13:00 by the Svenska Akademien, the Swedish Academy that has awarded the prize for over a century. As every year, the appointment arrives surrounded by predictions and recurring names, but without any official confirmation possible before the ceremony.

Among the names most discussed in the predictions circulating in recent weeks is the Chinese writer Can Xue, indicated ahead of Haruki Murakami and Mircea Cărtărescu. These are three authors who periodically return in the eve-of-announcement forecasts, but whose presence in the predictions does not correspond to any information coming from the Academy itself.

It is worth remembering — and this is a point that distinguishes the Nobel Prize in Literature from other awards — that there is no public list of the writers actually in contention for the 2026 edition. Nominations remain confidential under the Academy’s internal regulations, and the “favorites” lists that circulate every year in the media do not correspond to an official selection made known in advance.

This structural confidentiality makes the predictions an exercise in observing past trends rather than a forecast based on verifiable information: the names that return most frequently — such as those of Can Xue, Murakami and Cărtărescu for this year’s edition — reflect critical consensus around certain authors rather than actual knowledge of the shortlist of candidates. This happens every year: commentators, bookmakers and literary observers compile rankings based on career, recent translations, prizes already won elsewhere and perceived trends in the Academy’s tastes, yet without any access to the confidential documents that the latter keeps.

The selection mechanism in fact provides that nominations come from a restricted group of authorized parties — members of academies, professors of literature, presidents of writers’ associations, winners of previous editions — and that the entire process, including the committee’s discussions, remains sealed for fifty years. This is why every year the predictions remain, by definition, informed conjectures and not verifiable forecasts.

The final verdict will arrive only on October 8, when the Swedish Academy will make the chosen name public.