Lucy Knight

Read Claire Armitstead’s 2016 interview with Han Kang, in which she talks about her acclaimed novel The Vegetarian

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Malm was able to talk to Han Kang on the phone, he said. She was having an ordinary day and had “just finished supper with her son” when he broke the news to her

And the winner is Han Kang

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The South Korean writer has been announced as the latest Nobel laureate in literature

Lucy Knight

We’re very close to knowing this year’s Nobel prize in literature winner! Mats Malm, the permanent secretary of the Nobel committee, will soon take the stage to announce this year’s prize, before Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel committee, awards the prize.

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The Nobel prize live video has just shared the fact that Doris Lessing is the oldest winner of the literature prize to date – the perfect opportunity to share her iconic reaction video

The livestream has started

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Not long to wait now! You can watch along here:

Possible contender: Salman Rushdie

Ella Creamer

If 77-year-old British American author Salman Rushdie is named as the new Nobel laureate in literature today, he will be the first Indian-born author to take home the prize since poet Rabindranath Tagore in 1913.

Rushdie has written 15 novels, his latest being Victory City, as well as many works of nonfiction. His most recent book, Knife, was a memoir in which he recounted being attacked on stage in New York in August 2022.

He has been shortlisted for the Booker prize five times, winning the award in 1981 for Midnight’s Children. The book also won the Booker of Bookers in 1994 and the Best of the Booker in 2008, to mark the 25th and 40th anniversaries of the prize.

Earlier this month, he told an audience at Lviv BookForum that he is writing a new work of fiction which will comprise three novellas, each running to about 70 pages and relating to one of “the three worlds in my life: India and England and America”.

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“Can Xue is a solid bet,” says Guardian critic John Self. “She’s political, stylistically interesting and also a win for her would help the academy overcome its (self-acknowledged) weakness for European men. I’ve also heard people talking about Don DeLillo today, but he seems an unlikely choice – too surface-depth (said as someone who likes a bit of that) and the academy has never displayed an appetite for the big American novelists of the late 20th century before. They said in 2008 that it was too isolated and insular, and DeLillo probably exemplifies that.”

Possible contender: Alexis Wright

Ella Creamer

Alexis Wright’s latest novel, Praiseworthy, is the only book to have won both the Miles Franklin and Stella prize, two of Australia’s most prestigious literary awards. It also won the UK’s James Tait Black memorial prize. Could the Waanyi author also be taking home the world’s biggest literary prize today?

Praiseworthy, published by And Other Stories in the UK, is set in the Aboriginal community it is named after and structured into 10 parts, each narrated by a different oracle. “As in all Wright’s work, Praiseworthy depicts cruel, unjust, hypocritical and violent characters struggling against cruel, unjust, hypocritical and violent circumstances: a realist’s view of colonisation, in short”, wrote Declan Fry in a Guardian review last year.

Her other novels are Plains of Promise, Carpentaria and The Swan Book. Her non-fiction works include Grog War, about an Indigenous movement to introduce alcohol restrictions in a Northern Territory community, and Tracker, the “collective memoir” of Aboriginal leader Tracker Tilmouth.

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Nobel facts

In 1895, Alfred Nobel signed his last will, dedicating the bulk of his fortune to the establishment of the Nobel prizes. One part of the money would be awarded “to the person who, in the field of literature, produced the most outstanding work in an idealistic direction”.

Since 1901, 116 Nobel prizes in literature have been awarded. The prize was often not administered during the first and second world wars – no prize was awarded in 1914, 1918, 1935, 1940, 1941, 1942 and 1943.

It’s been jointly awarded only four times – most recently in 1974, when Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson shared it. Shared prizes are more common in the other Nobel prize categories.

The youngest person to receive the award was Rudyard Kipling in 1907, at the age of 41; the oldest was Doris Lessing, who received the prize in 2007 aged 87.

The prize has been awarded to 17 women and 103 men.

Two writers have turned it down. The 1958 winner Boris Pasternak initially accepted the award but later refused it under pressure from the Soviet Union. The 1964 literature laureate Jean Paul Sartre declined it because he had consistently declined honours.

Possible contender: César Aira

Ella Creamer

Argentinian writer César Aira has written more than 100 books. The secret to his prolific pace may lie in the writing method he developed early on, fuga hacia adelante, meaning “forward flight” – he writes and does not look back until he reaches the end of a story.

For several years, Aira’s name has been raised as a possible Nobel winner. “I already know that every October, until my death, I’m going to have to put up with that,” he said in an interview earlier this year. He said that, sometimes, the speculation proves useful: “For instance, now we live in a more luxurious apartment, one a little beyond my circumstances. And they rent to me because they see that I am a candidate for the Nobel.”

His novels, a handful of which are published in English in the UK, include Los Fantasmas (Ghosts, translated by Chris Andrews), El Divorcio (The Divorce, translated by Chris Andrews), and La Costurera y el Viento (The Seamstress and the Wind, translated by Rosalie Knecht). In 2015, he was nominated for the International Booker prize.

Gerald Murnane: ‘I’m satisfied at the moment, and if I never win the prize I’ll be satisfied’

Ella Creamer

Australian writer Gerald Murnane has long been tipped to win the Nobel prize. He is best known for his 1982 novel, The Plains, narrated by a filmmaker who travels to a vast land in the centre of an alternate Australia to capture the culture of its rich inhabitants. His other novels include Border Districts, A Million Windows and Inland.

“It’s about 10 years now since people first talked about me as a possible winner of the Nobel,” he told ABC News this week. “It’s possible, that’s all I can see, and it would be a wonderful result. But I’m satisfied at the moment, and if I never win the prize I’ll be satisfied with being – and I have to say this, it’s not a boast, it’s a statement of fact – I am the only Australian writer, and there’s plenty of Australian writers, I’m the only one who gets mentioned every year as a likely winner of the Nobel, so I take a lot of pride and satisfaction from that.”

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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.