Nation & World

<< Previous   of   Next >>   ADVERTISEMENT   CONTACT THE HERALD Do you have a news tip? newstips@heraldnet.com | 425.339.3400   Published: Saturday, October 4, 2008 Nobel Prizes' guessing game begins Associated Press STOCKHOLM, Sweden -- Human rights activists from China and Russia are considered front-runners to win the Nobel Peace Prize next week, while bettors are putting their money on an Italian, a Syrian or an Israeli for the literature award. The annual guessing game is in full swing as the prize committees prepare for their final meetings to single out achievements in science, economics, peace and literature for the $1.3 million awards. While the selections for medicine, physics, chemistry and economics are usually met by approval from the scientific community, the peace and literature committees nearly always face accusations of political bias. The top member of the Swedish Academy, nobelprize.org, which awards the literature prize, sparked a furor in U.S. literary circles this week by saying the United States is too insular and ignorant to challenge Europe as the center of the literary world. But Horace Engdahl, the academy's permanent secretary, rejected the notion that politics has anything to do with Nobel decisions. "One doesn't read literature with the same part of the brain as one votes for a political party," he said. Peace Prize speculation is focusing on human rights, partly because 2008 is the 60th anniversary of the signing of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Peace researcher Stein Toennesson, whose picks tend to shape world speculation, was leaning toward Chinese dissidents Gao Zhisheng and Hu Jia, both arrested and jailed through the Beijing Olympics to keep them out of the public eye. He also suggested Russian lawyer and activist Lidia Yusupova as a way of drawing attention to human rights abuses in Russia. Another possible pick is Vietnamese Thich Quang, a Buddhist monk and dissident who has spent more than 25 years in detention for his peaceful protests against Vietnam's communist regime. "We always watch Stein Toennesson's predictions with interest," said Geir Lundestad, the prize committee's nonvoting secretary. Beyond that, he would only say there were 197 nominations and that the winner would be announced Oct. 10. The Swedish Academy has announced it will present the literature prize winner next Thursday. Betting firm Ladbrokes gave the lowest odds Friday for Italian writer Claudio Magris, Syrian poet Adonis and Israeli author Amos Oz. They were followed by Americans Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth and Don DeLillo. The announcements begin Monday with the medicine prize. Physics, chemistry, literature and peace will follow later in the week, while the economics award will be announced Oct. 13.

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