The biggest gong in writing, the Nobel Prize for Literature, is due to be announced tomorrow. The winners seem to oscillate between some Great Name whose major work is behind them (V.S Naipul, for example) and a figure few in the Anglophone world has ever heard off. (When Saul Bellow was awarded the prize in 1976, some waggish colleague congratulated him on joining Halld�r Laxness in the pantheon.)Come on, while you tut-tut the lamentable cultural incuriosity of the English-speaking world, were you really familiar with, say, Imre Kert�sz or Gao Xingjian before they won? (And after ploughing through two-thirds of the latter’s fairly turgid Soul Mountain, I was initially mystified why the Swedish Academy chose this particular Chinese writer to pluck from obscurity. Politics may have played a role–Xingjian was persona non grata with the Chinese authorities–and the fact that the person who translated his work into Swedish is also a member of the Swedish Academy.)I found the last snippet of information from an article in the International Herald Tribune, which also speculates on the possible winners tomorrow. The Danish poet Inger Christensen is being tipped (again, I shamefacedly admit that I had no previous knowledge of this person), perhaps because it may be politic to have a female laureate who doesn’t write in English. (The Complete Review awards a B+ to one of her poems, alphabet.)Among the better-known writers (at least to me), Milan Kundera, Margaret Atwood, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Philip Roth are being mentioned as contenders. Of course, it would be standard operating procedure if none of the above got the nod. Details should be available from midday (Irish time) onwards from http://nobelprize.org/index.html Just for a lark, I’m going to say that Harry Mulisch will win. He’s got as much chance as anyone else, and deserves it simply for producing that barmy masterpiece, The Discovery of Heaven.