Among the favored writers and strongest contenders for the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature are the Romanian novelist Mircea Cărtărescu, Japanese bestseller Haruki Murakami and novelist Yoko Tawada, Russian novelist Lyudmila Ulitskaya, French memoirist Annie Ernaux, Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood and poet Anne Carson, Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse, Guadeloupan-French writer Maryse Condé, Chinese writers Can Xue and Yan Lianke, Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Irish novelist Edna O'Brien, German playwright Botho Strauss and philosopher Jürgen Habermas, British authors Hilary Mantel and Martin Amis, French writers Hélène Cixous and Michel Houellebecq, American novelists Colson Whitehead, Edmund White, Joyce Carol Oates, Cormac McCarthy, and Thomas Pynchon, Mozambican novelist Mia Couto, Rwandan writer Scholastique Mukasonga, American novelist Stephen King and philosopher Martha Nussbaum, Jamaica-born British poet Linton Kwesi Johnson.[2]