Ishiguro, who was born in Nagasaki, lived in England for almost 30 years before he made his first trip back to to Japan in 1989. He reportedly wasn’t aware of his home town’s significance as the target of a US atomic bomb in August 1945 until reading about it in a British textbook.

Despite this detachment from his country of birth, Japan features prominently in Ishiguro’s first novel, A Pale View of Hills, which is set in Nagasaki and England.

His second novel, An Artist of the Floating World, centres on Masuji Ono, a once respected artist who, in postwar Japan, must come to terms with his support for the country’s doomed militarist adventurism during the first half of the 20th century.
Britain’s selective memory regarding its imperial past also applies to Japan, Ishiguro said in a 2015 interview with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.

“In Japan – and I’m very distant from Japan, so I’m looking at this from a great distance – but there has always been this conflict with China and Southeast Asia about the history of the second world war,” he said.

“The Japanese have decided to forget that they were aggressors and all the things that the Japanese imperial army did in China and south Asia in those years.”

Our Japan correspondent Justin McCurry says:

Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, southwestern Japan, and moved to Britain with his parents and two sisters in 1960, when he was aged five. Many Japanese will be familiar with the 1993 film adaptation of Remains of the Day, but the mood in the country of Ishiguro’s birth is likely to be one of disappointment that Haruki Murakami has missed out on the Nobel prize yet again.

Here is the man in his own words, on writing his 1989 Booker winner The Remains of the Day:

The Academy has praised Ishiguro, the author of novels including The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, and his writing as “marked by a carefully restrained mode of expression, independent of whatever events are taking place”.

Ishiguro is the 114th winner, following in the footsteps of Seamus Heaney, Toni Morrison, Mo Yan and Pablo Neruda.

(Ishiguro is a very serious guitar player, one of his many talents.)

Strangely enough, the last time the Guardian interviewed Ishiguro was not for a book, but for a science exhibition – the show featured a machine to predict coastal storm surges built by his oceanographer father.

We’re getting close! In the meantime, lets admire the academy’s taste in doors.

This usually isn’t a bad way of predicting the winner:

(Or if it is a woman, the least translated into English)

It seems Margaret Atwood is the last minute favourite with readers, according to the bookies. Ladbrokes said that this year had been their busiest prize, in terms of amount staked, with Atwood the most popular writer. She was at 6/1 but is now amongst the favourites at 7/2 in the final minutes of betting.

A Ladbrokes spokesperson said: “literary punters think this year’s prize is hand-made for Atwood”.

Oof.

Author Hari Kunzru is still a bit gloomy after Dylan’s win last year.

(Me too, Hari.)

Another perennial favourite is Haruki Murakami:

Known for his existential, experimental novels (which often feature his love for cats and for women with nice earlobes), Murakami was born in Japan in 1949 and began writing when he was 29. His most famous novels include Norwegian Wood (1987); The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994-95) and Kafka on the Shore (2002).

Our very own Steven Poole once praised Murakami as “among the world’s greatest living novelists”. Murakami makes it on to the favourites list every year – and every year, “Harukists” (ardent Murakami fans) head to bars in Japan, hopefully waiting for their beloved author’s name to finally be called. If it doesn’t happen this year, at least they have the solace of liquor.

Here’s a lovely document: Albert Camus’s letter to his teacher, thanking him after his Nobel win in 1957.

The Chinese novelist and short story writer Yan Lianke is also a favourite:

Yan, who hails from Henan province, has won the Hua Zhong World Chinese Literature prize, the Lao She Literary award and the Franz Kafka prize. His novel The Explosion Chronicles, about a rural village which becomes a megalopolis, was longlisted for this year’s Man Booker International prize. He has previously been shortlisted twice for the award, last year for his novel The Four Books, set in a Mao-era labour camp. Last year, judges for the Man Booker International called him “one of China’s boldest living writers”.

Now the South Korean author and poet, Ko Un:

Described by Allen Ginsberg as “a magnificent poet, combination of Buddhist cognoscente, passionate political libertarian, and naturalist historian”, the Korean poet Ko Un is the author of more than 150 collections of poems, essays and fiction, and has long been named as a potential Nobel laureate. He became a Buddhist monk after the horrors of the Korean war and wrote his first few collections while under holy orders, going on to become a political activist, during which time he was arrested and imprisoned repeatedly. Andrew Motion has described him as “a major poet, who has absolutely compelling things to say about the entire history of South Korea, and equally engrossing things to say about his own exceptionally interesting life and sensibility”.

Now for Margaret Atwood, arguably the most famous name on this year’s list.

Atwood has had a doozy of a year with the very successful television adaptation of her 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, and another to come in Alias Grace, due on Netflix next month. The Canadian novelist, who is 77, is known for weaving searing political commentary into her novels, most often environmentalism and feminism. She won the Man Booker prize in 2000 for her novel The Blind Assassin, and has been nominated four other times. Her most recent novel, Hag-Seed, is a retelling of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest.

Let’s have a look at the current favourites, starting with Ngugi wa Thiong’o

Born in Kenya in 1938, Ngugi wa Thiong’o published his first novel, Weep Not Child, in 1964. When he started working with a local theatre group and writing in the Gikuyu language, he was arrested in 1977 and held in Mamiti Maximum Security Prison for a year without trial. “In prison I began to think in a more systematic way about language,” he told the Guardian in 2006. “Why was I not detained before, when I wrote in English?” He carried on writing and publishing in Gikuyu, even after his exile in 1982. He is now a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California. His last novel, translated in English as Wizard of the Crow, was published in 2006.

It has been pointed out online that the Academy may be hinting at a female winner this year, by tweeting this picture of the 14 women laureates (they did the same when Svetlana Alexievich won in 2015):

But the Academy are notoriously hard to predict. Perhaps the selection of Bob Dylan was the first salvo in a campaign to take literature back to the streets. After all, the arguments in favour of considering Dylan as a poet apply equally straightforwardly to rap music, and arguably with more force. Step forward the self-styled King of the Streets, Grandmaster Melle Mel, who Sara Danius will agree has been working “not just the written tradition, but also the oral one; not just high literature, but also low literature” since the 1980s, when he performed “often together with instruments” on tracks such as The Message, Step Off and White Lines (Don’t Don’t Do It). If the trailblazing vigour of Melle Mel is too much for the committee, then maybe they’ll opt for the dizzying inventiveness of Missy Elliott or the linguistic dexterity of MC Solaar. It is, however, a literary award, so it’s difficult to see past the mesmeric economy of Salt-N-Pepa, as exemplified in their 1986 hit Push It:

Ah, push it - push it good
Ah, push it - push it real good
Ah, push it - push it good
Ah, push it - p-push it real good

Last year, Bob Dylan’s odds shot from 50/1 to 10/1 just before the announcement. This year, according to the betting data site Smart Bets, which assesses odds based on the whole market, “the writer with the same momentum” is the South Korean poet Ko Un, who has moved from 33/1 to 10/1.

“It has definitely paid to follow the money over recent years when it comes to identifying the winner of the prize. Plenty of literary pundits scoffed at the idea of Bob Dylan being a contender, but they were made to eat humble pie by those watching market fluctuations,” said Smartbets.com’s Alexander Kostin.

“The literary betting public [is] seemingly very confident in the Korean poet, who has been a mainstay in the betting lists for considerable time. As for Murakami, the day he finally wins bookmakers will be made to pay by his army of fans. But my suspicion is that they will miss out again.”

Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ, author and son of consistent Nobel favourite Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, has a new technique: