And there we leave the literature prize for another year. (Let’s assume it is now a yearly event.)

Here is my colleague Alison Flood’s news story on the prize, which will be updated throughout the day as we get reactions:

The 2019 Nobel peace prize will be announced on Friday at 11am CEST (10am BST).

The Austrian playwright and author is a more controversial decision than Tokarczuk. His selection come days after the Swedish Academy promised to move away from the “male-oriented” and “Eurocentric” past of the Nobel prize in literature. Handke doesn’t change either of those directions.

His bibliography contains novels, essays, note books, dramatic works and screenplays. He has lived in Paris since the 1990s, and is most famous for his play The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other (completely dialogue free), his screenwriting credit for Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire and particularly the novel Die Wiederholung (Repetition).

Handke, who has Slovenic origins on the maternal side, famously gave a speech at the 2006 funeral of Serbian war criminal Slobodan Milošević, a decision that was criticised widely. His nomination for the Heinrich Heine prize that same year was eventually withdrawn due to his political views. His 2014 win of the International Ibsen award was also met by protests in Oslo.

How exciting.

With the head of the Swedish Academy promising to move away from the prize’s “male-oriented” past, its important to remember that only 14 women have won, compared with 113 men. Only one laureate – the late Toni Morrison – is a woman of colour.

The 14 women who have won are:

Selma Lagerlof, 1909
Grazia Deledda, 1926
Sigrid Undset, 1928
Pearl Buck, 1938
Gabriela Mistral, 1945
Nelly Sachs, 1966
Nadine Gordimer, 1991
Toni Morrison, 1993
Wislawa Szymborska, 1996
Elfriede Jelinek, 2004
Doris Lessing, 2007
Herta Muller, 2009
Alice Munro, 2013
Svetlana Alexievich, 2015

You can watch it at the top of this liveblog. You can enjoy 10 minutes of nervous chatter among journalists.

The Japanese novelist is a frequent frontrunner for the prize. Last year, he withdrew from the New Academy award – the one off replacement for the Nobel in 2018 – citing a wish to concentrate on his writing.

Then, the New Academy said in a statement that Murakami had emailed them saying that it was a great honour to be shortlisted. But “Murakami then said his preference is to concentrate on his writing, away from media attention … The New Academy regrets but respects his decision.”

Will he accept the Nobel if it finally comes his way this year? Fans certainly hope so.

Will this be the Canadian poet’s year? Bookmakers’ odds aren’t as reliable as they used to be, but Carson has been rising steadily for the last week. And it’s not hard to see why. Writing in the Guardian about her verse-novel Red Doc> in 2013 , Sarah Crown was emphatic: “Carson is, simply, one of the very best.”

A poet, essayist, translator, librettist and classical scholar, Carson is as daring with form as she is deft with emotion. When Daphne Merkin reviewed The Beauty of the Husband, which glories in the subtitle “A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos”, she recalled how Carson’s writing had been unclassifiable from the start, “even by today’s motley, genre-bending standards. Was she writing poetry? Prose? Prose poems? Fiction? Nonfiction? Did even her publishers know for sure?”

“What her fellow poets would do well to ask themselves,” Merkin concluded, “is not whether what Carson is writing can or cannot be called poetry, but how has she succeeded in making it – whatever label you give it – so thrillingly new?”

Another annual tradition set to return with the Nobel is people posing as contenders on Twitter to catch out lazy journalists.

As we said earlier, Guadeloupean novelist Maryse Condé is the current favourite (not that that always helps you win the Nobel). Last year, she was the first and only winner of the New Academy prize in literature, a one-off award intended to fill the void left by the cancellation of the Nobel.

The author of some 20 novels, including Desirada, Segu and Crossing the Mangrove, Condé was praised by New Academy chair of judges Ann Pålsson as a “grand storyteller” who “belongs to world literature”.

“She describes the ravages of colonialism and the post-colonial chaos in a language which is both precise and overwhelming,” Pålsson said. “The dead live in her stories closely to the living in a … world where gender, race and class are constantly turned over in new constellations.”

Speaking on a video played at a ceremony in Stockholm, Condé said she was “very happy and proud” to win the award. “But please allow me to share it with my family, my friends and above all the people of Guadeloupe, who will be thrilled and touched seeing me receive this prize,” she said. “We are such a small country, only mentioned when there are hurricanes or earthquakes and things like that. Now we are so happy to be recognised for something else.”

The 79-year-old French writer is the author of several acclaimed works of “auto-fiction” – a blend of autobiographical detail and novelistic storytelling. Her most recent works translated in English are The Years (translated by Alison L Strayer), which tells the story of France from 1941 to the present day through the thread of one woman’s life; and Happening (translated by Tanya Leslie), the harrowing story of her illegal abortion as a student in Rouen in 1963.

In France, she is regarded as perhaps the greatest chronicler of French society in the last 50 years, and is one of the few women on France’s male-dominated high school literature syllabuses.

In a recent interview with the Guardian, she explained her work thusly: “In the autobiographical tradition we speak about ourselves and the events are the background. I have reversed this [...] The events in my book belong to everyone, to history, to sociology.”

Ernaux has stacked up awards in recent years, winning the Marguerite Yourcenar award, the Premio Hemingway and the Prix Formentor, and landing a shortlist spot on this year’s Man Booker International prize.

With only 14 women having triumphed so far in a prize whose history stretches back almost 120 years, the award is still a long way off from gender parity. Even the chair of the Nobel committee, Anders Olsson, admits the jury needs to “widen our perspective”.

“Previously it was much more male-oriented,” Olsson said. “Now we have so many female writers who are really great, so we hope the prize and the whole process of the prize has been intensified and is much broader in its scope.”

But maybe we shouldn’t expect too much. Putting aside the troubling implication that only “now” do we have “female writers who are really great”, it’s not the first time the Swedish Academy has declared they may be able to find one or two authors who might not be blokes.

Rewind to 2011, when Peter Englund – then permanent secretary of the Nobel Academy – admitted on the Guardian Books podcast that the fact Herta Müller was only the 12th female laureate weighed on his shoulders. Like Olsson, Englund proclaimed that the Academy must “reach out”. But he rejected any suggestion of positive discrimination, claiming it would be “disastrous for the prize and it would really be disastrous for the one who got the prize”.

After all his talk about the need for the Academy to open up, who did the panel select in 2011? Tomas Tranströmer.

At Ladbrokes (as of last Friday), Guadeloupean author (and the winner of last year’s, one-off New Academy award to replace the usual Nobel) Maryse Condé is topping the odds at 4/1. She is followed by Lyudmila Ulitskaya at 5/1, and Haruki Murakami and Margaret Atwood, both at 6/1. “With the exception of Murakami who is seemingly always the bridesmaid when it comes to Nobel literature runners and riders, the top of betting is dominated by female writers,” said Jessica O’Reilly of Ladbrokes. “Literary punters are convinced that at least one, if not both, awards will be won by women this time around, with Conde and Ulitskaya heavily backed for success.”

Other contenders include Ngugi Wa Thiong’o at 8/1, Anne Carson, Ko Un and Javier Marias at 10/1, Yan Lianke at 12/1, and Amos Oz and Don DeLillo at 16/1.

It’s worth noting, however, that the favourite hasn’t won the Nobel for at least the last few years. When Kazuo Ishiguro took the most recent prize in 2017, Thiong’o and Murakami were topping the odds – as they were when Bob Dylan won in 2016.

In previous years, however, last-minute favourites have gone on to take the prize: in 2008, a run on betting on Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio led to suspicions of a leak, in 2009, Herta Müller zoomed up the rankings on the morning of the prize, as did Tomas Tranströmer in 2011. According to Dagens Nyheter, an internal investigation by the Swedish Academy concluded that Jean-Claude Arnault, the man at the centre of the sexual abuse and financial misconduct scandal that postponed last year’s prize, may have leaked the names of at least seven laureates.

Welcome to day four of the 2019 Nobel prizes! Losing steam yet? Hopefully not - as today we see the return of the Nobel prize in literature and, for the first time in more than 40 years, two laureates named due to the scandal that cancelled last year’s prize. (More on that later.)

We had the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine on Monday, physics on Tuesday and chemistry on Wednesday. But today is all about authors (or maybe a musician who has “created new poetic expressions”, everything is permissible now). So if you have written a cracking bunch of books (or if your wife did it for you), stay close to your phone.

Everyone else, please join us for the live announcement, comment and analysis. We’ll find out the winners around 12pm BST.