Lucy Knight

Could AI really win this year’s prize?! It does feel like AI’s year: the Nobel prize in physics has been awarded to Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield this year for their work on machine learning, and the chief executive of Google’s AI unit, Sir Demis Hassabis, was jointly awarded the chemistry prize on Wednesday.

Lucy Knight

Last year, Norwegian writer Jon Fosse won the Nobel, having long been tipped for it. Check out Catherine Taylor’s guide to his work here

Ella Creamer

Bets suspended on Alexis Wright – but why?

Earlier this week, Ladbrokes had been accepting bets on today’s winner (bets are now closed). However, punters weren’t able to bet on one of the listed candidates: Alexis Wright.

There has been some speculation on X as to why bets were suspended:

As well as possible explanations:

Ladbrokes have been approached for comment.

Philip Oltermann

Why a European winner seems unlikely

By awarding the Nobel prize in literature to France’s Annie Ernaux in 2022 and Norway’s Jon Fosse in 2023, the Swedish Academy has kept the award on the European continent for two years in a row. So it’s no surprise that the bookies are betting on a writer from another continent to receive the accolade this year.

Chinese avant-garde fiction writer Can Xue leads the pack, 12 years after Mo Yan last brought the prize to the People’s Republic. Other names being whispered in the corridors of publishers and literary agencies are those of the Antiguan-American novelist Jamaica Kincaid, Australian Gerald Murnane and Argentinian writer César Aira.

But the academy is notorious for its unpredictability, even more so after two new members joined last December. “I think they’ve gone to great pains to find some writer that will catch the culture commentariat with their pants down,” Dagens Nyheter’s culture editor Bjorn Wiman has said.

So a third consecutive European winner seems unlikely but not impossible. Two names in particular are mentioned again and again: Hungarian László Krasznahorkai and Romanian Mircea Cărtărescu.

Both are highly versatile and playful writers, who bely eastern Europe’s gloomy literary reputation: 68-year-old Cărtărescu used to mostly write poetry while his country was behind the Iron Curtain but has received most international attention for his novel trilogy Orbitor, published in English by Archipelago Books as Blinding. Cărtărescu has described himself as part of a “postmodern” generation of Romanian writers who eschewed the heavy expressionism of its predecessors in favour of something more ironic, playful and fantastical.

Krasznahorkai, a longtime collaborator of Hungarian film director Béla Tarr, too is often described as postmodern. His dystopian but comedic novels, such as 1985’s Satantango and 1989’s The Melancholy of Resistance interweave light and shade. His most recent, Herscht 07769, centres around a man who writes Angela Merkel letters about Johann Sebastian Bach and particle physics. It was published in Ottilie Mulzet’s English translation by New Directions this September.

Lucy Knight

Independent publisher Fitzcarraldo celebrated its 10th birthday last month, and at the anniversary party founder and publisher Jacques Testard thanked the Swedish academy in his speech “for having almost exactly the same taste as us”. And it is astonishing – Fitzcarraldo is the UK publisher of five Nobel laureates: Jon Fosse; Annie Ernaux; Olga Tokarczuk; Elfriede Jelinek and Svetlana Alexievich. After Ernaux’s win, Anna Cafolla found out more about “the little publisher that could”.

Ella Creamer

Who is the bookies’ favourite, Can Xue?

Chinese writer Can Xue has been the bookies’ favourite to win the Nobel for two years running. Will 2024 finally be her year?

Can Xue is the pen name of Deng Xiaohua, born 1953 in Changsha, Hunan Province, in South China. In the late 50s, her parents, who worked at a newspaper, were condemned as ultra-rightists. Her father was sentenced to re-education through labour and in 1967, during the Cultural Revolution, he was jailed.

Can Xue couldn’t continue her education, graduating only from elementary school. She is largely an autodidact; she read western and Russian literature while working as a teacher, a tailor and a “barefoot doctor” providing basic health care.

She began writing in the 80s, developing her distinctive avant-garde style. She has since written many novels, novellas and essays. In 2019 and 2021, she was longlisted for the International Booker prize, with Love in the New Millennium (translated by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen) and then I Live in the Slums (translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping).

If she is named the new Nobel laureate today, she will be the 18th woman to receive the prize and the second Chinese citizen to win after 2012 laureate Mo Yan.

Critic and author David Hering said that he would “love” Can Xue to win. “A true heir to Kafka and Lispector. You never know where you’re going to be at the end of one of her sentences.”

Ella Creamer

Last year’s winner

In 2023, Norwegian author Jon Fosse took home the prize “for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable”.

His works include the Septology series of novels, Aliss at the Fire, Melancholy and A Shining.

“Fosse blends a rootedness in the language and nature of his Norwegian background with artistic techniques in the wake of modernism,” said Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel committee for literature, at the time.

He was the fourth Norwegian to win the prize, and the first to write in Nynorsk, one of the two official written forms of the Norwegian language.

During his laureate speech in December last year, he said that his first books were “quite poorly reviewed” and that if had listened to critics, he would have stopped writing 40 years ago.

Fosse’s UK publisher is Fitzcarraldo Editions, which also publishes Annie Ernaux, the winner of the 2022 Nobel prize in literature. Fosse’s win marked the independent publisher’s third win in five years, after Olga Tokarczuk was made laureate in 2018.

Lucy Knight

Here’s what the bookies have been saying about who it might be this year…

Ella Creamer

How the Nobel works

How is the Nobel laureate in literature chosen?

First, the Nobel committee – made up of a handful of writers – sends out nomination forms to hundreds of individuals and organisations. These include:

• Members of the 18-person Swedish Academy and of other academies, institutions and societies which are similar to it in construction and purpose

• Professors of literature and of linguistics at universities and university colleges

• Previous Nobel prize laureates in literature

• Presidents of those societies of authors that are representative of the literary production in their respective countries

Once the nomination forms are in, the Nobel committee then filters the nominations and submits a list for approval by the academy. The committee whittles the list down to 15-20 names, and then five.

Next, members of the academy read the work of the nominees, before conferring in September. In early October, they vote on the next Nobel laureate in literature – a candidate must receive more than half of the votes cast.

Lucy Knight

Welcome to the Guardian’s Nobel prize in literature live blog, as we wait in anticipation for the 2024 laureate to be revealed. The coveted award, which has been won by writers including Kazuo Ishiguro, Annie Ernaux and Harold Pinter, is given to “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”, according to the will of Alfred Nobel.

Will this year be the year for Chinese avant garde author Can Xue, who has been bookmaker Ladbrokes’ favourite for the last two years? Might it go to Thomas Pynchon, Margaret Atwood or Haruki Murakami? Or will it be a choice that takes us all completely by surprise – like when Bob Dylan won in 2016?

Join Ella Creamer, Philip Oltermann and me for the next hour or so as we post live updates leading up to the announcement at 12pm BST (1pm CEST).