Nobel Prize 2010 nominees: who will take the peace prize?

After last year's controversial choice of President Barack Obama for the Nobel peace prize, speculation over this year's Nobel recipients has run wild.

There are 237 nominees this year, including six Chinese dissidents, the radio group Democratic Voice of Burma and the Internet.

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For the peace prize, Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo is topping the list of front runners at the PaddyPower betting site with odds at 3:1. China, however, has urged the Nobel Prize committee to not give him the top prize.

The head of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, which assists the Nobel Committee in making its decisions, told reporters Monday that a senior Chinese official had warned him that awarding the peace prize to Liu would hurt relations between Norway and China.

The committee has angered China before, most notably with the 1989 peace prize going to the Dalai Lama. However, some insiders say this year's choice will not be a more conservative choice following the controversy over Obama.

Other highly rated choices are the Russian human rights activist Svetlana Gannushkina and Sima Samar, an Afghan women's rights activist who leads the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission.

A few long shots include Bono with 50:1 odds at Paddy Power and Tony Blair, with 80:1 odds.

The Nobel Prize for Literature also has betting sites counting up the odds. Ngugi wa Thiong'o, a Kenyan novelist, and Cormac McCarthy are running a tight race. The U.K. bookies say his odds of winning are 2.75:1, just edging out McCarthy at 3:1.

Rounding out the top three authors is the Japanese author Haruki Murakami.

Many Nobel Prize dissenters claim the award does not really matter. The Post's Anne Applebaum wrote last year, "Nevertheless, year in, year out, the Nobel laureate turns out to be an obscure writer, usually European, whose works are hardly known outside of a few German-speaking and Germano-centric countries."

Newsweek wrote last year, after the award went to the semi-obscure Herta Müller, "There are all the authors whose greatness actually diminishes the value of the Nobel. How, we have to ask, could the jurors have erred so badly as to neglect James Joyce, Eugene Ionesco, Eudora Welty, and Vladimir Nabokov?"