Dylan is the first songwriter to have won the prize, and his regular appearance in the betting odds was regarded as one of the longrunning jokes of the Nobels.
In 2011, a late gamble sent him soaring up the odds to become the fourth favourite, due to what Ladbrokes described as “a substantial gamble from clued-up literary fans”.
In her citation, Sara Danius said that though the choice might seem surprising, “if you look far back ... you discover Homer and Sappho. They wrote poetic texts which were meant to be performed, and it’s the same way for Bob Dylan. We still read Homer and Sappho, and we enjoy it.”
Bob Dylan is the 259th American to have won a Nobel, across all disciplines, and the first to win the literature prize since Toni Morrison in 1993. He is the ninth American to land the literary laurels since the medals were founded in 1901, putting an end to an apparent hostility among the Swedish academicians towards American literature, which reached its apogee in 2008 with an extraordinary tirade by Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Nobel prize jury.
He said: “The US is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature … That ignorance is restraining.”
Sara Danius, permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, describes Dylan as “A great sampler … and for 54 years he has been at it, reinventing himself.”
Start with Blonde on Blonde, she said... “An extraordinary example of his brilliant way of rhyming. putting together refrains, and his brilliant way of thinking.”
Bob Dylan recording his 1966 album Blonde on Blonde. Photograph: Sony Music/BBC
The Nobel archives are a treasure trove of trivia, with the list of nominees for each year only revealed 50 years on. In 1965, the most recent list to have been made public, the prize went to Mikhail Sholokhov “for the artistic power and integrity with which, in his epic of the Don, he has given expression to a historic phase in the life of the Russian people”.
The Nobel prize in literature is usually awarded in the same week as the science medals, so this year’s delay has got tongues wagging. Does it reveal a split among the jury?
Academician Per Wästberg has denied this is the case, saying it was simply a matter of diary logistics, but Swedish media commentators smell a schism:
“If you ask me, it’s absolutely not a ‘calendar’ issue. This is a sign there’s a disagreement in the process to select a winner.” Bjorn Wiman, cultural editor at Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter, told the South China Morning Post.
Swedish Radio reporter Mattias Berg suggested the Academy’s 18 members may have argued over a “politically controversial laureate, such as Adonis,” the Syrian poet, whose most recent publication is a polemic tract on political Islam.
Seasoned Nobel watchers may remember a similar delay back in 2005 when Observer journalist Alex Duval Smith reported that the jury had split over Orhan Pamuk for political reasons. The prize that year eventually went to Harold Pinter, though Pamuk went on to take in the following year.
Studying the betting might seem like a mug’s game, but analysis from Ladbrokes has shown that over the last 10 years the last-minute favourite has taken the prize four times, while 91% of the time the winner has had odds of 10/1 or less when betting was suspended. The eventual winner has also seen their odds decrease by an average of 32% in the final week before the prize is announced.
On the Guardian books desk we’re hoping for someone from the world beyond Europe. A woman would be good, too – Svetlana Alexievich’s win last year only went a tiny way to addressing the historical imbalance. But if it must be a white European bloke, how about Spain’s Javier Marías (currently 16/1)?.
Frontrunner … Ngugi wa Thiong’o Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
Welcome to our live coverage of the Nobel prize in literature 2016
Welcome to the final flush of this year’s Nobel season when the sixth and last medal of 2016 will be awarded to “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction ...” Or that was the intention of the 19th-century industrialist Alfred Nobel, who endowed the award from a fortune made from weapons and explosives. This rubric goes some way to explaining its occasional eccentricity – who today would consider the first recipient, Sully Prudhomme, to be ideally directed?
Each prize this year is worth 8m Swedish krona or £744,000, and we will be here to record who will be the 113th writer to receive this eye-watering sum, and the accompanying starburst of literary celebrity, at 12noon BST (1pm Central European Time).
Judging by the last couple of years the person who is least likely to have picked the winner is the winner him- or herself. The French writer Patrick Modiano was out to lunch with his wife when news of his win broke in 2014, while Svetlana Alexievich’s surprise last year was written across her face when the Belarusian journalist answered an unexpected knock on her door …
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