Guardian writers suggest some contenders for the coveted title. If you like a nomination, cast a vote for them with a short comment in the comments. If you'd like to suggest someone else, write a short appreciation in the comment thread below

Another year, another flurry of newsmakers, all jostling for the ultimate accolade: to be voted the Guardian's person of the year. Two years ago readers opted for Camila Vallejo, the Chilean student year and arch-protester in a year of protest. Twelve months later it went to Chelsea Manning, Bradley as he was then, who this year was sentenced to 35 years in jail for leaking state secrets.

This year, protesters and whistleblowers have once again been in the news – but so have Eurosceptics, the Catholic church and, of course, Silvio Berlusconi. Here, Guardian writers offer their nominations.

Pope Francis

Pope Francis has eschewed the grandeur and trappings of his predecessors. Photograph: Andreas Solaro/AFP/Getty Images

You don't have to be one of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics to believe that Pope Francis is the Person of 2013. His appeal goes far beyond his flock: note that the most cited name on the English-language internet in 2013 was his – ahead of Obamacare and, despite Edward Snowden, NSA – with fourth place going to his Twitter handle, @Pontifex.

Even non-believers have been moved by the radicalism of his message, decrying runaway materialism, "unbridled capitalism" and a cult of money that he condemns as latter-day idol worship. But it's the fact that he appears to embody that message that makes him such a potent messenger. Eschewing the grandeur and trappings of his predecessors, he arrives for meetings with heads of state in a blue Ford Focus; he wears old shoes; he astonishes members of the global public who have written to him by picking up the phone and calling them himself. He cradles the faces of the disfigured, declaring that every human being has worth. He seems to practise what he preaches – and among world leaders that is almost uniquely rare and powerful. Jonathan Freedland

Marco Weber and Sini Saarela



Greenpeace activists Marco Weber and Sini Saarela. Photograph: AP

In one day these two Greenpeace activists did more than millions of tweets, petition signatures and celebrity endorsements to raise awareness of the threat oil drilling poses to the Arctic, one of the planet's few remaining wildernesses. On 18 September, as the pair were blasted by water cannons, they successfully attached themselves to Gazprom's Prirazlomnaya platform in the Barents Sea. In return for highlighting what leading scientists have called the "dead-cert" risk of a huge oil spill in the region if drilling continues, they were detained without trial for months in Russian prisons in the Arctic circle.

For putting themselves on the line, for waking the world up to what oil and gas companies are planning in the Arctic, for making the invisible visible, they deserve to be jointly crowned person(s) of the year. Adam Vaughan, environment editor

Edward Snowden

Edward Snowden, who blew the whistle on National Security Agency surveillance. Photograph: The Guardian/AFP/Getty Images

Edward Snowden knew the consequences of his actions. Sitting in the Mira hotel in Hong Kong, just days before exposing himself as being behind one of the biggest leaks in western intelligence history, he acknowledged almost all his options were bleak.

He knew he faced being branded a traitor and transferred to jail in America or, at best, delaying the process with a lengthy court battle fighting extradition. Even today, his options are not good, living in restrictive conditions in Russia, his temporary asylum up for renewal in the summer. If Vladimir Putin was to decide his propaganda value has dwindled, he might even find himself in a few years traded for a prominent Russian held in the US. And yet he was prepared to swap a well-paid job and relatively comfortable life with his girlfriend in Hawaii for this uncertain life. For him, it was a price worth paying. He believes state surveillance had expanded well beyond a point that is acceptable and that people needed to know about it.

And what has he achieved? Congress is considering legislation to rein in the National Security Agency and Barack Obama is conducting a review. Internet companies are introducing more secure encryption. There have been diplomatic incidents over the US, the UK and Australia spying on supposedly friendly countries. But the biggest achievement is that until Snowden turned whistleblower the number of people concerned about the growth of state surveillance was small while today, that concern is widespread. Ewen MacAskill

Elon Musk



Elon Musk in the new electric Tesla car. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

Elon Musk has had quite a year. The American business magnate, investor and inventor, who founded PayPal, advanced his plans for space exploration while his electric car company, Tesla Motors, not only became profitable but accelerated rollout of a network of "supercharger" stations in the US.

But it was Musk's most outlandish technology proposition to date, the "Hyperloop" project proposed in August, that won him the most headlines. A $6bn (£4bn) proposal for a form of transportation linking LA and San Francisco, Hyperloop would provide subsonic air travel where pods travel in a partial vacuum within a 350 mile-long tube allowing commuters to travel between the American cities in just 30 minutes (faster than even a commercial aeroplane journey).

With a group of Tesla and SpaceX engineers Musk released an alpha-level design that went at least part of the way to working out how it would operate. The independent Ansys Corporation ran simulations using the design, and although there were modifications required, indicated that the challenges facing Hyperloop were capable of being overcome. Musk has expressed his intent to develop a prototype Hyperloop, and judging by his work with SpaceX and Tesla Motors, if anyone can make it work, Musk can. Samuel Gibbs

Kanye West



Kanye West at the MTV Video Music Awards. Photograph: Larry Busacca/Getty

If the mark of a great artist is to push the boundaries of what's acceptable then Kanye West ran away with 2013 – and that's before we even get to the music. Taking pot shots at the president? Co-opting the confederate flag for his stage wear? Releasing a video that involved him simulating sex on a motorbike with Kim Kardashian? Kanye positively thrived in the creative role of getting up people's noses.

Such was the case with his sixth album, Yeezus, a confounding and utterly uncompromising piece of music that – as much as it sounded like anything else – took its influence from acid house and avant-rap group Death Grips. At times it was almost too much to process. On Blood On The Leaves, Kanye sampled Nina Simone's version of Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit, a darkly poetic song about African-American lynchings, and used it to rap about the VIP area at a basketball game. It could have been one of the most catastrophically misjudged steps in musical history, yet under Kanye's guidance it was hard to deny that it sounded fantastic. Which, of course, sums up his year: the explosive interviews, unpredictable behaviour and rampant egomania may have provided regular talking points, but Kanye almost never allowed these things to break his creative stride. In fact, they often fuelled it. Tim Jonze, music editor

Andy Murray



Andy Murray raises the winner's trophy after beating Novak Djokovic in the men's singles final. Photograph: Glyn Kirk/AFP/Getty Images

Even jaded hacks watching on Centre Court when Andy Murray defeated Novak Djokovic and 77 years of history to win the men's singles title at Wimbledon will long remember the primal scream of joy and disbelief he unleashed in their direction when the Serbian found the net to hand him victory.

The frenzied release of decades of tension echoed back at the Scot from those watching live or on big screens at SW19 or knotted in tension on their sofas. It was not only his shot-making and athleticism but a mental fortitude and new freedom fostered by his coach, Ivan Lendl, that enabled Murray to finally lift the title on the court where he had wept a year earlier in defeat to Roger Federer.

Those tears, plus his subsequent Olympic gold medal and a moving documentary on the eve of the tournament in which he talked about growing up in Dunblane, all helped the public to warm to a driven, drily humorous man as well as the phenomenal athlete who has thrived under huge pressure in a golden age of men's tennis. Owen Gibson

Waris Dirie



Former model Waris Dirie has raised awareness about female genital mutilation. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

Waris Dirie has done more than any other person to raise awareness about the dreadful practice of female genital mutilation (FGM), which potentially affects millions of women, principally in Africa and Asia but also increasingly in the UK and other west European countries.

Dirie is herself a victim of this practice and her bravery in speaking publicly about her experience is one of the reasons why she deserves the Person of the Year award. Apart from raising awareness, Dirie has helped implement measures to eradicate this abuse of women, including the setting up of medical centres to help women who have suffered FGM.

Dirie's successful career as a campaigner, advocate, ambassador, author and model is an inspiration for all those people, men and women, who come from disadvantaged backgrounds in the poorer, developing countries and who feel, despite these obstacles, that they have a vital contribution to make in changing the world around them for the better. Simon Tisdall

Jack Monroe

Jack Monroe has landed a book deal following her blog offering tips on how to eat on a budget of £10 a week. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

The blogger, cookery writer and campaigner Jack Monroe brought a flash of colour, wit and authenticity (not to mention delicious food) to the debates around austerity and poverty in 2013. A year ago the Southend-based single mother was enjoying a tiny, if devoted, following for her blog, which mixed cheap, nutritious recipes with incisive posts on welfare reform and how to survive on a food budget of £10 a week. Scroll forward 12 months and she has a Penguin book deal, two columns in the Guardian and is in demand as a regular commentator on radio and TV.

In October Monroe entered the Independent on Sunday Pink Power list at number 19; a fortnight later her arrival as a star of the liberal left was confirmed when the Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn criticised her as a "Poverty poster girl". Monroe replied with typical eloquence. Smart and down-to-earth, Monroe, who left school at 16, brilliantly articulates the fears and frustration of a life on benefits. She may have a TV cookery show in development but shows no sign of easing up on her anti-poverty campaigning. As she said in June: "Until people realise benefits doesn't mean scrounger and austerity isn't a fun middle-class way to grow your own vegetables, there's still a lot of work to do." Patrick Butler, social policy editor

Satoshi Nakamoto



Bitcoin is the world's first cryptocurrency. Photograph: Ted Soqui/hCorbis

Nobody knows who she or he is, nor even whether s/he is a single person or a group (though the latter seems unlikely). The pseudonymous Japanese name is a fake. But that is the given name of the inventor of Bitcoin, the digital currency that has gone from a nerd's delight in 2009 to something taken seriously by central bankers in 2013, and whose notional value passed $1,000 a "coin" in November.

Bitcoin shows huge promise as real "digital cash" for the internet: just as with cash, you can buy goods and services with it essentially anonymously (each "coin" has a serial number, like a banknote, but few people worry about their cash transactions being traced). You don't have to go via a bank or other middleman; coin authentication is peer to peer.

And it can bear a certain amount of inflation – every coin can be split into 100m "satoshis", each of which would be worth 0.001 cents at an exchange rate of $1,000 for each Bitcoin. If Bitcoin's exchange rate continues to rocket, those satoshis could come in handy.

That could make Bitcoins an essential medium for online transactions once its exchange rate with non-digital currencies settles down. That's why central bankers are looking at it seriously. With the internet seeping into everything we do, the need for a really digital currency is becoming increasingly urgent.

Given all the internet sleuthing that has gone on, it's unlikely that a duo or group could have kept secret for this long how they devised the cryptographic protocols, peer-to-peer systems, and economic model that underlies Bitcoin. Someone would have cracked, whispered or cashed in; which points to Nakamoto being a lone operator.

The New Yorker suggested it might be a Finnish researcher, Vili Lehdonvirta, at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology. He laughed and denied it. The writer then suggested that Michael Clear, an Irish researcher, might be. He denied it too. Fast Company magazine pointed out that a patent filed in August 2008 by Neal King, Vladimir Oksman and Charles Bry seemed to have some similarities to Bitcoin's technologies; all three have denied being Nakamoto.

It's widely believed that Nakamoto has a huge hoard of Bitcoins created back at the currency's dawn, which could now be cashed in for vast amounts. But again, there's no proof. All we have is Nakamoto's original 2008 paper – and Bitcoin. Charles Arthur, technology editor

How to vote



If you like a nomination, cast a vote for them with a short comment in the comment thread. If you'd like to suggest someone else, write a short appreciation in the comments.

We will tot up the number of comments and announce a winner, hopefully before 2014. When the whole thing will start all over again.

• This article was amended on 5 December 2013. The original said Kanye West sampled Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit on Blood On The Leaves. In fact he sampled Nina Simone's version of Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit.