Amos Oz seen as Nobel favorite in UK
Guardian newspaper reports Israeli author has best odds of winning prestigious award in literature category for 2009
Oz is followed by Algerian novelist Assia Djebar, Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo, and American novelists Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon, Italian scholar Claudio Magris and Japanese author Haruki Murakami
The British daily states, however that "Oz needn't start preparing his Nobel speech quite yet," as last year's eventual winner, French novelist JMG Le Clézio, was initially given placed on the 14th place on bookies' lists.
British novelists are way behind on the Guardian list, with Salman Rushdie at the 80th place and Ian McEwan closing the list at the 100th place.
According to the Guardian, the Nobel Prize committee usually receives around 350 proposals for candidates a year, and narrows this down to a list of 20 names which it presents each April to the 18 Academy members who select the winner. By now, the report said, the Academy will have shortened this list to about five names, and will reveal its choice in early to mid-October.
Most winners over the last decade have come from European countries, the Guardian said, with France's Le Clézio taking last year's prize, preceded by the UK's Doris Lessing in 2007.
The list of winners over the past 10 years includes Turkey's Orhan Pamuk, the UK's Harold Pinter and VS Naipaul, Austria's Elfriede Jelinek, Portugal's José Saramago, Hungary's Imre Kertész, France's Gao Xingjian and Germany's Günter Grass.
