<3 The U-Store
Exposed beams? Check. Bucket hat? Double check. Nobel prize? TBD.
Princeton creative writing professor (and literary superstar) Joyce Carol Oates has an 18-1 chance to win this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, according to British gambling website Ladbrokes.com.
The site gives only 11 people better odds to win than Oates, including heavy favorite Cormac McCarthy at 5-2 odds. Haruki Murakami, who also taught at Princeton, was given 10-1 odds.
Toni Morrison, who won the Nobel in 1993, is the only Princeton faculty member ever to win in literature (Princeton alum Eugene O’Neill ‘10 picked one up in 1936).
Oates turned 72 in June, which falls comfortably within the bandwidth of age acceptability. Last year’s winner, Herta Muller, was 57 , and Doris Lessing won the Nobel in 2007 at the ripe old age of 90 (full list with ages here).
All available bets on the award (including long shot Bob Dylan (?!) at 100-1) after the jump! (If gambling were legal, that is. The Ink does not condone gambling on major literary awards.)
Were you hosed from Joyce Carol Oates’s Creative Writing class? Yeah, me too (signed in to an art history course second round…)