British bookmaker Ladbrokes gives Uzbek writer Hamid Ismailov odds of 33/1 for the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature.
The Ladbrokes list also includes Haruki Murakami, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Stephen King, and J.K. Rowling. Bookmakers’ odds, however, have no connection to the Nobel Prize’s official nomination process. Details of nominations are kept secret for 50 years, and the literature laureate is selected by the Swedish Academy.
The 2026 laureate will be announced on October 8. This year’s Nobel Prize carries an award of 12 million Swedish kronor, or about $1.2 million.
Ismailov was born in 1954 in Tokmok, in what is now Kyrgyzstan, and grew up in Uzbekistan. He was forced to flee Uzbekistan in 1992 after coming under pressure from the government of then-President Islam Karimov over his writing and political views. His works were subsequently banned in the country. He settled in the United Kingdom and went on to work for the BBC World Service for 25 years.
Ismailov writes principally in Uzbek and Russian. His international profile has grown through English translations of novels including The Railway, The Dead Lake, and The Underground.
His novel The Devils’ Dance, translated from Uzbek by Donald Rayfield with John Farndon and published by Tilted Axis Press, won the EBRD Literature Prize in 2019.
In 2025, Ismailov’s We Computers: A Ghazal Novel, translated from Uzbek by Shelley Fairweather-Vega and published by Yale University Press, was named a finalist for the U.S. National Book Award for Translated Literature.
The novel draws on Persian poetic traditions and literary history to explore artificial intelligence. Its story centers on a French poet and his Uzbek translator, who experiment with a computer program capable of analyzing and generating literary texts.
The Nobel Prize in Literature, first awarded in 1901, went to Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai in 2025.
