Nobel Prize season kicks off today
AFP, Stockholm
The 2003 Nobel Prize season gets underway today with the announcement of the winner of the Literature Prize and ends eight days later with the Peace Prize, as speculation mounts over who will take home the world's most prestigious awards.Literary circles around the world are abuzz with the names of possible winners for the Literature Prize, which guarantees increased book sales and worldwide fame. Peace Prize watchers say meanwhile that while there are no clear favourites this year, Pope John Paul II and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva are strong contenders. Among those most often cited to succeed last year's Literature Prize laureate Imre Kertesz of Hungary are US author Philip Roth, Peru's Mario Vargas Llosa and South Africa's JM Coetzee, as well as Syrian poet Adonis. Dutch-language Writers Hugo Claus and Cees Nooteboom have been on the lips of Nobel watchers for years, as have US author Norman Mailer, French writers Yves Bonnefoy and Tahar Ben Jelloun, Albania's Ismail Kadare and Salman Rushdie of Britain. The suspense will end today at 1:00pm (1100 GMT), when Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the 217-year-old Swedish Academy, opens a sealed envelope and pronounces the name of the winner before a throng of international journalists.
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