Thank you for joining us today for the liveblog. You can read the full story by Alison Flood here.

The Nobel peace prize will be announced tomorrow at 10am BST (11:00 CEST).

“Thank you very much for coming” prize chair Anders Olsson says with a smile, and the ceremony is over!

Who is Abdulrazak Gurnah?

The Tanzanian novelist was born in Zanzibar in 1948, and has since lived in the UK and Nigeria

He writes in English, and his most famous novel is Paradise, which was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1994

Gurnah currently lives in the UK and taught English Literature at the University of Kent

Read Maaza Mengiste’s review of Gurnah’s latest novel Afterlives here

The Nobel prize in literature has been awarded to the novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”.

Gurnah, who grew up on the island of Zanzibar but arrived in England as a refugee in the 1960s, has published ten novels as well as a number of short stories. The Nobel committee said that “the theme of the refugee’s disruption runs throughout his work”.

Read the full story here:

Margaret Atwood, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Haruki Murakami are getting a lot of love in the live stream comments

A closer study of the odds reveals that Richard Osman, fresh from topping the book charts in the UK with his latest slice of cosy crime, is at 43/1 to win this year’s Nobel prize for literature, while Stephen King and JK Rowling are both at 41/1. Patti Smith and Joni Mitchell, possibly riding on Bob Dylan’s laureate coattails, are at 35/1. Personally, I’d love to see what happened if it went to the mysterious Elena Ferrante, who’s at 25/1.

Naturally, we can’t do a Nobel prize live blog without sharing this video of 2007 winner Doris Lessing. It never fails to make us laugh.

Let’s also take a moment to note Olsson’s response to Shephard’s questions about Peter Handke’s controversial win. The choice was widely criticised over Handke’s support of Slobodan Milošević’s genocidal Serbian regime; Olsson found the criticism “a bit shocking because it did not concern his literary merit as a writer”, but reminds “proud” of a choice which he is “sure … will be viewed as one of our best choices in the history of the prize”. I’m not sure about that, but I’m amused by his description of Handke as a “political idiot”.

Here’s the context: “What was for us particularly bewildering was that we did not get any criticism for the prize to Pinter, for instance. Harold Pinter was a person who was much more articulate and radical in a political sense than Handke ever was. Handke is a political idiot, you could say. His stance on politics is not all that radical or as conscious as Pinter’s was.”

Shephard also has an interview with Nobel prize committee chair Anders Olsson, who tells him that “we feel that we do not have any crisis anymore” and that “we have found stability in our work in the academy”. This follows the cancellation of 2018’s prize after allegations of sexual misconduct, financial malpractice and repeated leaks. The sexual assault accusations were made against Jean-Claude Arnault, husband of academy member Katarina Frostenson; Arnault was subsequently convicted of rape, and Frostenson departed the 18-strong Swedish academy, along with a handful of other members.

Are there any clues to be gleaned from Olsson’s answers? I’m intrigued by his comment that “it’s very important for us right now to expand and widen our horizons”, and that while “literary merit” is the “absolute and the only criterion for us within the academy”, he feels that “what we can do is to widen our orientation of literature”.

Asked about the prize’s reputation for Eurocentrism and lack of female winners – just 16 women have won the Nobel, out of 117 winners – Olsson admitted it had been “very Eurocentric in the first part of the 20th century, and very few women won”. But he pointed to “a considerable shift” in recent years, and revealed that from January, international experts “will be giving us reports from areas of language [where] we do not have deep competence within the academy – Asian and African, languages that we do not command but wish to”.

“That will be a very interesting change, and it will expand our knowledge and our orientation in world literature,” he said. It seems to me that this is something the academy should have already been doing – but let’s see what changes it brings.

Alex Shephard at the New Republic always has wise thoughts to share about who the winner might be. This year, he believes Ernaux has a shot, as does Russian writer Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Thiong’o, Guadeloupean novelist Maryse Condé, Somali author Nuruddin Farah, and Chinese writer Can Xue.

“The prize has been awarded to Europeans 14 times this century – this despite the Nobel committee’s vocal emphasis on greater diversity and its quasi-public apologies for the prize’s well-earned reputation for Eurocentrism,” writes Shephard. “With this in mind, the likelihood of the next Nobel Prize in literature being awarded to a non-European and non-American should be exceedingly high. Should. For all the talk of righting this ship, however, it’s clear that the Nobel committee is going to do whatever it wants and that what it wants is to award a dour novelist writing lyrical reflections about an affair they had during World War II with a 15-year-old girl, preferably in French.”

Indeed.

The eternal question...

Possible contenders: Annie Ernaux

According to the bookies, who since the Swedish Academy clamped down on its alleged leaks have been less insightful in their tips, French novelist Annie Ernaux, Canadian poet Anne Carson and Norwegian author and dramatist Jon Fosse are also in with a chance. Surely it can’t be another North American poet however, after Louise Glück took the award last year for “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”.

The Nobel prize official Twitter account posted about 1993 winner Toni Morrison. Morrison is one of just 16 women who have been awarded the prize since it began in 1901.

Why not try this quiz on the Nobel prize website and see how many laureates you can match to their work?

Possible contenders: Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami is another evergreen favourite. I’m doubtful of his chances, but I’d be delighted if this was his year. Perhaps the august Swedish Academy will be persuaded by his forthcoming tome, Murakami T: The T-Shirts I Love, in which the “international literary icon opens his eclectic closet” to share “photographs of [his] extensive personal T-shirt collection, accompanied by essays that reveal a side of the writer rarely seen by the public”. I’d love to see the citation from the Swedish Academy which could take that in.

Possible contenders: Ngugi wa Thiong’o

After a long run of European or North American winners, might this be Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s year? The celebrated author is perennially tipped, perennially near the top of the bookies’ odds, and yet always overlooked by the Swedish Academy. Fiammetta Rocco, culture correspondent at the Economist and a fellow Kenyan, is hoping to hear his name come 12pm today. “His most recent book, The Perfect Nine, is his most surprising, proof of how creative he still is at 83,” she told me. “And also, because he is now on daily dialysis, this may be his last chance.”

(Ngugi is also my hope as well.)

Last year poet Louise Glück became the first American woman in 27 years to win the Nobel prize in literature. The 78-year-old writer had previously won the Pulitzer prize and the National Book Award, and was praised by the chair of the Nobel prize committee, Anders Olsson, for her “candid and uncompromising” voice, which is “full of humour and biting wit”.

Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the Nobel prize in literature, which should be awarded 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.

This year’s winner will be announced at 12pm BST (1pm CEST). Will it be Annie Ernaux, the bookmaker’s favourite? Will it be another wildcard like Bob Dylan, who was chosen in 2016? Or could it finally be the year for Japanese bestseller Haruki Murakami, who has surely been practising his acceptance speech for at least a decade.

Join my colleague Alison Flood and I for the next hour or so as we post updates, trivia and speculation about this year’s prize.