A member of the Nobel Academy said on Friday that the Swedish Academy is worried that somebody might have found out earlier than the award night that Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio was going to be given the Nobel Prize for Literature. Still, Horace Engdahl, the academy's permanent secretary, told a local paper that he will look at the matter even if it was unclear to him how such information could have been leaked.

Another official of the academy announced that the permanent secretary will make no further comment to the international press.

On Thursday, Le Clezio was handed the Nobel Prize for his 2003 novel, “Revolutions,” which was characterized as gathering "the most important themes of his work: memory, exile, the reorientations of youth, cultural conflict." The days before the award it appeared that something was awkward. This was determined by betting volumes and raised a lot of question signs.

Engdahl said that this didn’t look so good and that it’s the first time he felt something was going wrong, “but there was also a wave of speculation that began in Paris. When I was there last weekend I had a feeling that there were some who believed strongly in Le Clezio."

Lasse Dilschmann, the head of British betting agency Ladbrokes' Nordic operations, said that odds for Le Clezio had fallen from 15 to 1 at the end of September. He added that the odds were “heading down well below 2 when we closed the betting."

"It is quite unusual for us to close betting. It has, as far as I know, happened only once before in Sweden," Dilschmann said.