Will a woman get the Literature Nobel?

Women writers, long overlooked by the Swedish Academy which each year awards the Nobel Literature Prize, could be well-placed to take home the honours this year, observers said.

Women writers, long overlooked by the Swedish Academy which each year awards the Nobel Literature Prize, could be well-placed to take home the honours this year, observers said, citing Algeria's Assia Djebar, Joyce Carol Oates of the United States and Dane Inger Christensen as potential winners.

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Among the usual suspects whose names have surfaced year after year are US novelist Philip Roth, Albania's Ismael Kadare, Czech author Milan Kundera, Syrian-Lebanese poet Adonis and Swedish poet Tomas Transtroemer.

All of them worthy men, no doubt, but perhaps not what the Nobel committee is looking for this year.

"In Stockholm there has been a lot of talk, and it has intensified this year, that there are so few women who have won the prize," Svante Weyler, chief editor at Norstedts, one of Sweden's biggest publishing houses, told AFP.

The Academy has honoured only nine women since the prize was first handed out in 1901. Most recently, it went to Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska in 1996.

Before her, there was African-American writer Toni Morrison in 1993 and South African novelist Nadine Gordimer in 1991, but before that you have to go all the way back to 1966, when Nelly Sachs of Sweden won.

While the Academy is as tight-lipped as ever about this year's laureate, Stockholm's literary circles are abuzz with speculation as the clock ticks down towards the big announcement, expected either this Thursday or the next.

Among those also mentioned as possible winners are poetesses Friederike Mayroecker of Austria and Vizma Belsevica of Latvia, Russian poet Gennady Aygi, Spanish author Alvaro Pombo, Hungarian novelists Peter Esterhazy and Peter Nadas, Somalian writer Nuruddin Farah and an old favourite, Canadian writer Margaret Atwood

Last year, the honours went to JM Coetzee of South Africa, and the year before to Hungary's Imre Kertesz.

"If the past two winners had not been so unanimously accepted then the subject (of the prize going to a woman) would have come up much sooner," Weyler said.