In any case, we have had three consecutive winners who might be called “writers’ writers.” This is why Handke’s abysmal politics weren’t disqualifying it’s also why one probably shouldn’t expect another offbeat choice like Bob Dylan-though, to be fair, I should not be trusted when it comes to Dylanology and the Nobel Prize. In my interview with Nobel Prize Committee Chair Anders Olsson, he stressed this again and again: The Academy is focused exclusively on literary merit and nothing else. Since returning, the academy has made three capital- L literature choices in a row: Tokarczuk, Handke, and Glück. The prize was canceled-in the old sense of the word, though sort of in the new sense, too-the following year, and seven members of the academy resigned. Back in 2017, after Ishiguro won, I wrote that the Nobel Prize was becoming more populist and fun and was exploring different modes of literature, like Svetlana Alexievich’s oral histories and Bob Dylan’s collaborations with ELO’s Jeff Lynne. The first is the identities of the three most recent laureates. Still, for all the uncertainty, three data points may help the armchair Nobel Prize speculator. After Dylan-a pop culture icon? Ishiguro-a Booker Prize–winning novelist? Louise Glück-an elite niche poet? How does this system work?” And where does it go from here? Should the prize continue to reward obtuse and obscure writers of dense prose? Should it take applications via Medium? Should it become the first literary award given out to an influencer? (An actual influencer, not an aspiring one like Salman Rushdie or the people he D.M.s on Instagram at 2 a.m.) When I asked the Swedish journalist, novelist, and Nobel watcher Jens Liljestrand who he thought would win, he wrote, “No one really knows anymore, and it’s hard to see the logic. The prize’s recent history doesn’t offer much insight into its trajectory-the past few years offer a muddle of competing ideas. With all the left turns and overcorrections, it’s not so obvious what the Nobel Prize in literature is celebrating. In recent years, its identity has become unmoored amid oddball picks (Bob Dylan), conventional ones (Olga Tokarczuk), and the literary award equivalent of begging to get ratioed on Twitter (Peter Handke). The Nobel remains the most prestigious cultural prize in the world, despite all the recent controversies and scandals. Today’s Nobel Prize in literature is clearly not the same prize that Fo won-it’s not even the same prize that the French novelist Patrick Modiano won in 2014. When Dario Fo, an internationally obscure Italian political satirist and literal clown, won the Nobel Prize in literature 25 years ago, the organizers of the prize told Fo’s publisher that giving it to a bigger name-say, Salman Rushdie or (the, incredibly, still alive) Arthur Miller- would have been “too predictable, too popular.” This essentially summed up the long-standing reputation of the Nobel Prize in literature: The Nobel Prize Committee was renowned for trawling across Europe (mostly) for worthy but often obscure writers there was, as in Fo’s case, often a political dimension, as well, with the Swedish Academy’s own leftish politics often reflected by its laureates.