Celebrated Rwandan novelist Scholastique Mukasonga has been tipped by British bookmakers among the frontrunners to win the Nobel Prize in Literature 2020. The winner is set to be announced on Thursday, October 8. The Nobel Prize in Literature Award, which is considered the world’s pre-eminent literary award, is bestowed annually to well-deserving authors that have produced the best work in the field of literature from a different region of the world. The recipient of this award in a particular year is often decided by the Swedish Academy. Mukasonga is on the list of contestants for the Nobel Prize in Literature 2020, thanks to her successful works, including her novel ‘Notre-Dame du Nil’, published in 2012 which has already won two international prizes, including the ‘Prix Ahmadou Kourouma’ and ‘Prix Renaudot’. Her latest novel, ‘Kibogo Est Monté au Ciel’, was published earlier in 2020. Following the bookies’ ‘surprise’ nomination among the favorites for the big prize, Mukasonga reacted on her Twitter account that, “As we know, English Bookmakers bet on anything they find. They therefore also bet on the candidates for #NobelPrize2020 consulting by chance the list of Nobel Prize, I am surprised to see my name there.” She, however, faces tough competition from 31 other authors including Maryse Condé, the Guadeloupean novelist who won an “alternative” Nobel in 2018, Russian novelist Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Japanese bestseller Haruki Murakami, Canadian author Margaret Atwood and perennial contender Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the Kenyan novelist, poet and playwright. There have been 116 laureates for the award to date, 15 of whom were women, most recently the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, who was awarded the postponed 2018 prize last year. Should Mukasonga scoop the Nobel Literature Prize 2020 Winner, she will walk away with an award worth 10m Swedish kronor (Euros 1.3 million), on top of the award. The reigning laureate is 77-year-old Austrian novelist Peter Handke, who won the award last year. There are five Nobel Prizes that are established by the will of Alfred Nobel in 1895. They include the Nobel Prize in literature, Nobel Prize in physics, Nobel Prize in chemistry, Nobel Prize in Medicine or Psychology and finally, the Nobel peace prize.
