The bets on who will win the Nobel Prize for Literature 2022, which is ruled this Thursday morning, are already burning.
For 100 years, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature was almost always a man, European and quite old.
But how much have things changed in this 21st century?
Below we describe the winners by birth, gender and age.
It took 10 editions for the jury to choose the first woman.
It was the Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf, in 1910. Until 1990, 93% of the winners were men, with only six exceptions.
Her dominance was such that a 25-year winless streak ensued, between Germany's Nelly Sachs (who won the Nobel Prize in 1966) and South Africa's Nadine Gordimer (who won it in 1991).
This gender bias, however, has been reduced.
Of the last 15 winners, 6 have been women, 40%.
The winners also shared origins.
Of all the winners of the 20th century, 80% were people born in Europe, Canada or the United States, while Africa, Asia and the rest of America shared the other 20%.
Nobody born in Oceania has won a Nobel Prize for Literature.
However, this pattern has also blurred over time.
Today Europeans and Americans continue to dominate the award, but their weight has dropped from 80% to 66% in the last 15 years.
Differences are also evident by country.
France is the most successful country, with 11 winners, followed by the United States (9) and Germany (8).
The Swedish jury has also awarded the prize to seven compatriots.
The following map shows the place of birth of all the winners, and has allowed to detect some patterns going city by city.
There are six Nobel Prize winners for Literature who were born in Paris and three who were born in Dublin.
Three other cities have the privilege of having two winners, all European: Berlin, London and Madrid, where José Echegaray and Jacinto Benavente were born.
Another increasingly common factor in winners is living many years.
The youngest winner was the British Rudyard Kipling, in 1907, who was 41 years old, but the average is 60 years.
The oldest person to win the Nobel was Doris Lessing, in 2007, when she was 88 years old.
The trend over time is predictable: the awards go to older people.
For example, octogenarians used to be 5% of the winners, but in recent years they are practically triple, 14%.
Who will win in 2022?
Predicting the Nobel Prize for Literature has proven to be a complicated exercise.
Every year, the list of supposed candidates is longer, but that does not stop there from being surprise winners, in which almost nobody thought.
There are writers who spend decades in the pools and end up never winning the prize, in another proof that the jury is capricious, discreet and, essentially, unpredictable.
This uncertainty is verified in the bookmakers.
The table shows their favorites and an upward estimate of how likely they judge their win.
According to bookmaker Ladbrokes, Salman Rushdie and Michel Houellebecq start with the best chance of winning, closely followed by Cornan McCarthy, Anne Carson and four other contenders with similar odds.
But can we say that they are the favorites?
Yes, at least for bookmakers.
But beware: they are terribly weak favourites.
Among the top five they do not add up to one in six chances of winning!
What these data are telling us, in reality, is that 85% of the time the prize will go to someone else, but who knows who.
The Nobel is more difficult to predict than a presidential election (because the polls work) or a World Cup, and much more difficult than calculating who will win Eurovision.
Here in EL PAÍS we tell how the bets have hit the Eurovision winner of the last three editions.
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