Born in 1943, Glück has written 12 collections of poetry and two book of essays. Her most recent collection was 2014’s Faithful and Virtuous Night. Over a career spanning six decades, she has explored trauma, death and healing, in poems that scholars have argued are both confessional and not. As Olsson, chair of the Nobel, said earlier: “She is not to be regarded as a confessional poet. She seeks universality.” (Some poets may dispute that being an either-or.)

Glück has written about developing anorexia as a teenager, which she later said was the result of her efforts to assert independence from her mother, as well as the death of her older sister, which happened before Glück was born. While in therapy, she elected to enrol in poetry workshops over a traditional college education and began to develop her voice. She published her first collection, Firstborn in 1968.

She won the Pulitzer prize for poetry in 1993 for her collection The Wild Iris. She was appointed the US poet laureate in 2003, and visited the White House to receive the National Humanities Medal from US president Barack Obama in 2016.

US poet Louise Glück “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”

The Japanese novelist is frequently high up in the odds – so much so that a group of diehard fans, also known as “Harukists”, tend to gather each year to watch the ceremony, tumblers of whisky (a motif in his novels) at hand. Japan’s love for Murakami is greater than that for even other Japanese contenders; when British-Japanese novelist Kazuo Ishiguro won in 2017, staff at Kinokuniya bookshop in Tokyo reportedly let out a groan before quickly disassembling their immaculate Murakami display and replacing it with Ishiguros.

It has become a bit of a running gag that he never wins – so much so, last year the Japan Times ran a rather intense piece about the nation’s deep disappointment: “In the Kyodo newsroom, a wail of disappointment is heard, champagne is returned to the fridge and trembling hands struggle to a keyboard to punch out the bitter news.”

According to the BBC, Murakami’s eternal struggle puts him in a dream club with Amy Adams and Björk, for cool people who never win stuff. So that’s something. And when Murakami was nominated for the New Academy award – the one-off replacement for the Nobel when it was cancelled – he withdrew from contention, citing a wish to concentrate on his writing. Or did he just want to stay in the club with Amy Adams and Björk? Reason says the latter. Björk would definitely enjoy his weird thing about earlobes.

With more than 100 books to her name, Joyce Carol Oates is rarely far from the adjective “prolific”. Novels, short stories, plays, poetry and criticism have poured from her in an unbroken stream since her debut collection of short fiction was published in 1963. Ranging across genre from thriller to romance and from horror to literary fiction, Oates has explored class, race, gender and the violence of modern society in novels such as Them (1969), Because it is Bitter and Because it is My Heart (1990), Blonde (2000) and The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007).

Writing in the New Yorker about her latest novel, the “frequently brilliant” Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars, Leo Robson summed up the appeal of Oates’s often unruly work: “She believes in the itching and the ornery and the oddly shaped, and has been trying to produce fiction that feels as irreducible to simple meanings, as resistant to paraphrase, as the subject matter it portrays.”

We’re just 10 minutes away - you can watch the video at the top of this liveblog (you may need to refresh your browser if you joined us a while back). Enjoy watching some journalists looking nervous.

Another perennial contender is the Hungarian novelist, playwright and essayist Péter Nádas. He is best known internationally for his 700-page novel A Book of Memories, which divides the story of a young Hungarian writer growing up under communism between three narrators. When it was published in English in 1997, Eva Hoffman compared it to Proust and Musil in the New York Times, praising Nádas’ exploration of memory “in profligate and fantastically modulated detail, all the compressed meanings, the swirl and buzz of sensation and impression implicit in even the most mundane moments”. Susan Sontag hailed it as “the greatest novel written in our time, and one of the great books of the century”.

Hungarian reviewers were in raptures over Parallel Stories, a 1,100-page epic that jumps across the last 100 years of Hungarian and German history in disjointed fragments, but critics were divided when it appeared in English in 2011. Francine Prose called it “dense, filthy, brilliant”, but Tibor Fischer said it was “like having your face jammed in someone’s crotch … It’s a great historical soup, with bits of this and that bobbing around, seemingly thrown in randomly by the chef – or, more succinctly, a mess.”

Yan Lianke has also been named as a possibility. The widely acclaimed Chinese novelist and short story writer has been given odds of 12/1 at Ladbrokes - he feels like a solid option. Some of his novels, which tend towards experimental, have been banned in China - The Day the Sun Died, which has been seen as a political critique of Xi Jinping’s “Chinese dream”, had to be published first in Taiwan.

“It is true that I have been finding it hard to get my books published in China,” he told the Observer in 2018. “But actually that doesn’t matter because, if you don’t have a publisher, you can write whatever you like – and that is a kind of release, a kind of freedom. Actually, writers are restrained by the publishing world – you have to fit in with what they require and if you can’t do that, you won’t get published.”

You can have a read of one of his short stories here, as we pass the time until 12pm.

The Canadian poet, translator and classicist is also a new tip, thanks to Björn Wiman, culture editor at Swedish paper Dagens Nyheter, who doesn’t think the Swedish Academy will be put off by the fact that another Canadian, Alice Munro, won not so long ago (2013). The first woman to have won the TS Eliot prize for poetry, Carson is the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, and has also won prizes including the Griffin poetry prize.

From Autobiography of Red, a verse novel telling of a winged red monster named Geryon who falls in love with Herakles, to The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, she has been described as “one of the most idiosyncratic intelligences at work in contemporary literature” by Fiona Sampson in the Guardian.

“Known for her supreme erudition … her poetry can also be heart-breaking and she regularly writes on love, desire, sexual longing and despair,” said the Poetry Foundation.

Jamaica Kincaid, the Antiguan-American author who is seen as one of the Caribbean’s leading writers, is one new name doing the rounds this year. Kincaid was born in St John’s, Antigua as Elaine Potter Richardson, leaving Antigua at the age of 16 to work as an au pair in New York. She changed her name in 1973, partly for anonymity as she began writing stories for the New Yorker. From The Autobiography of My Mother to Annie John, her novels explore the Caribbean and family relationships, in particular those between mothers and daughters, and provide a fierce critique of colonialism. Her memoir My Brother was about her half-brother’s death from Aids.

“Kincaid critically examines her Antiguan past with its colonial legacy, and her American present,” writes Luca Prono for the British Council. “She is deeply dissatisfied with both of them, as she finds that the society she has left behind was characterised by bigotry, while North America can only offer opulent ignorance and is permeated by racism. Her work is also characterised by a constant exploration of the mother-daughter relationship (‘I write about my mother and her influence on her children and on me all the time’), the quest for identity of former colonial subjects, especially women, and the cultural struggle against colonisation and its erasure of local traditions.”

One of Russia’s leading contemporary novelists and short story writers, and a vocal advocate for freedom of expression, Lyudmila Ulitskaya began her writing career after she was sacked as a scientist in the 1960s, and accused of dissident activity by Soviet authorities for translating a banned American book into Russian. She holds the record for nominations for the Russian Booker prize, having been nominated five times and winning once (making her the first woman to win). In novels and collections such as The Funeral Party, Sonechka, Daniel Stein, Interpreter, and The Big Green Tent, she has explored the role of women in Russian domestic and public life, state surveillance, the intimacy and love found in non-traditional families, and faith.

Masha Gessen wrote in the New Yorker: “Every time I start reading something of hers, I am initially taken aback by the flatness of her characters’ emotional landscape and her transparently convoluted plots. And then, after a certain point, I can’t stop.”

Famously outspoken, Ulitskaya is dismissive of Vladimir Putin, calling him a joke. “I’m not afraid,” she told the Observer in 2011. “Compared to the Stalinist era, our government now is a pussycat with soft paws.”

Guadeloupean novelist Maryse Condé has very short odds this morning (not that that always helps you win the Nobel). She was the first and only winner of the New Academy prize in literature in 2018, 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.”

Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the Nobel prize in literature, which, in the words of my colleague Alison Flood earlier this week, “sees itself as the world’s pre-eminent literary award”, and will be announced at 12pm BST (1pm CEST).

Who will win is always a mystery - albeit a mystery with a recurring cast of contenders, with the occasional surprise (hey Bob Dylan, 2016’s Nobel laureate! Hey, you!) thrown in. Names tipped this year include the Guadeloupean novelist Maryse Condé, Russian writer Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Antiguan-American writer Jamaica Kincaid and Canadian poet Anne Carson. (Lots of women – we’ll get to that later.) In addition, there are the perennial big-name favourites who should have their speeches tucked away already – such as Japanese bestseller Haruki Murakami, Canadian author Margaret Atwood and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the Kenyan novelist, poet and playwright.

But who knows! Let’s see if nostalgia for the giddy days of 2016 kick in, and watch them give it to Van Morrison.