11.22am: Good morning, and welcome to our first-ever Nobel prize for literature liveblog. The prize is announced at 1pm in Sweden - that's 12 noon our time. You can watch a live webcast of the announcement here (and I strongly advise you to do so: sitting around watching a webcast of a pair of gilt doors constitutes my favourite moment of the literary year. The excitement when the doors finally open is quite out of proportion). We'll post the winner as soon his or her name is announced, and then round up reaction, extracts and whatever else we can lay our hands on.

What news so far? Well, the odds have shifted around again in the night. Dylan continues to lead the pack at 5:1 (inexplicably, in my view - but there's a good discussion going on on yesterday's blog about his candidacy as to why he would in fact be a deserving winner). Hot on his heels is Algerian-born Académie Française member Assia Djebar, who is currently tying for second place in with Haruki Murakami, both at 6:1.

Odds can be a good indicator for the Nobel - in 2009, Herta Muller zoomed up the rankings on the morning of the announcement, and sure enough, yomped off with the prize. But as MA Orthofer points out over on the excellent Literary Saloon, "remember that at closing last year it was Cormac McCarthy that led the pack at 3:1 (with Murakami at 5:1)" - and Maria Vargas Llosa came from nowhere to win. It doesn't do to get carried away.

Journalists hate the Nobel because it's such an unknown quantity: there's no shortlist, so no way of knowing whether you're going to be confronted with a winner about whom you know very little (I refer you to the now-infamous Year of Jelinek, about which the less said, the better). But what's nerve-racking for us may well be conversely entertaining for you, on the other side of the computer screen. Either way, it certainly adds some spice to the proceedings.

Here's a full list of the winners of the prize to date, and let's while away the minutes until the announcement with some idle speculation. For the record, my money's on Adonis - but I've never guessed one right yet, so I beg of you, don't take me word for it ...

11.38am: Looking around at what people are reporting, most are buzzing about Bob Dylan's streak up the odds, but there's a good Washington Post piece asking whether this is the year when the Nobel committee will turn its gaze east, towards Asian and Middle Eastern literature. South Korean poet Ko Un and Syria's Adonis have featured in the favourites list for years; both would be worthy winners, and there's a particular sense that to award the prize to a Syrian author in the year of Arab Spring would be timely.

The Post points to comments from Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Nobel committee, in which he said that the academy "has started to work actively to broaden its scope beyond Europe and the English-speaking world". You can listen to an interview Richard Lea did with him earlier this year, here.

11.47am: Just tuned in to the webcast, and I can exclusively report that we are currently looking at a room of people, milling around, waiting - much as we are - for something to happen. There's some up-tempo muzak, though, and several nice chandeliers.

11.48am: Woah! it looks as if the Nobel website has gazumped itself: go to the front of the Nobel prize for literature site, and they appear to have posted the name of the winner: Serbian author Dobrica Cosic.

Full page reads



Serbian author Dobrica Cosic recipient of 2011 Nobel prize in Literature "We lie to deceive ourselves, to console others, we lie for mercy, we lie to fight fear, to encourage ourselves, to hide our and somebody else's misery."

Citation from the novel trilogy Divisions (Deobe) The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2011 is awarded to the Serbian author Dobrica Cosic, the last dissident of the 20th century, witness of a declining era, as well as the prophet of an emerging one. All his life Dobrica Cosic has been writing one continuous story, one novel. One doesn't easily forget his characters and the meaning of their universal love, hate, pleasure and pain

.

11.54am: But wait! Perhaps it's a hoax - on Twitter, Chris Power (of this parish) points out that the url looks dodgy. This is the page that you navigate to from the rest of the Nobel site, currently displaying a natty photo of laureate Dario Fo.

Well, we'll find out in six minutes, either way, and it's kept me entertained. People are still milling, meanwhile.

11.56am: More support for the hoax theory - @elguillelmo just tweeted us @GuardianBooks to say



It's obviously a hoax: lookup the URL: NOBELPRIZELITERATURE.ORG Created On:05-Oct-2011 15:13:54 UTC

And here's a link to a letter sent to the committee earlier this year from Haris Alibasic, President of the Congress of North American Bosniaks, explaining why they ought never to give the prize to Cosic. Hoax-tastic, I'm now thinking.

30 seconds to go! The muzak has been switched off ...

12.00pm: And here we are: the winner of the 2011 Nobel prize for literature is Tomas Transtromer.

12.02pm: The citation from the committee: "through his condensed translucent images he gives us fresh access to reality".

12.07pm: Here's a blog on Tranströmer from Bloodaxe, who published an expanded edition of his New Collected Poems earlier this year, to celebrate his 80th birthday.

12.08pm: And here's a first pass on the news from my colleague, Richard Lea. Full story coming soon.



The Swedish Academy has responded to accusations of insularity over recent years by awarding the 2011 Nobel prize for literature to one of their own: the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer. Tranströmer becomes the eighth European to win the world's premier literary award in the last ten years, following the German novelist Herta Muller in 2009, the French writer JMG le Clezio in 2008 and the British novelist Doris Lessing in 2007. Praised by the judges for "his condensed translucent images" which give us "fresh access to reality", Tranströmer's surreal explorations of the inner world and its relation to the jagged landscape of his native country have been translated into fifty languages. Born in Stockholm in 1931, Tranströmer studied at the University of Stockholm and worked as a psychologist at an institution for young offenders. His first collection of poetry, 17 Dikter (17 Poems, was published in 1954, while he was still at college. Collections including Hemligheter på vägen (1958) and Klangar och spår (1966) reflected on his travels in the Balkans, Spain and Africa, while the poems in Östersjöar (1974) examine the troubled history of the Baltic region through the conflict between sea and land. He suffered a stroke in 1990 which affected his ability to talk, but has continued to write, with his collection Sorgegondolen going on to sell 30,000 copies on its pubilcation in 1996. At a recent appearance in London, his words were read by others, while the poet, who is a keen amateur musician, contributed by playing pieces specially composed for him to play on the piano with only his left hand. Tranströmer has described his poems as "meeting places," where dark and light, interior and exterior collide to give a sudden connection with the world, history or ourselves. According to the poet "The language marches in step with the executioners. Therefore we must get a new language."

12.12pm: So what does everyone think? Good choice? Or should it have gone outside Europe? He's the eighth European to win the prize in the last 10 years (on the other hand, lovely to have a poet on National Poetry Day ... ).

12.16pm: Robin Robertson, poetry editor at Cape (and one of our own great poets), is one of Tranströmer's translators. Here he is writing about him in 2006 - he's particularly good on Tranströmer's relationship with landscape (doesn't this make you want to read him?):



The landscape of Tranströmer's poetry has remained constant during his 50-year career: the jagged coastland of his native Sweden, with its dark spruce and pine forests, sudden light and sudden storm, restless seas and endless winters, is mirrored by his direct, plain-speaking style and arresting, unforgettable images. Sometimes referred to as a "buzzard poet", Tranströmer seems to hang over this landscape with a gimlet eye that sees the world with an almost mystical precision. A view that first appeared open and featureless now holds an anxiety of detail; the voice that first sounded spare and simple now seems subtle, shrewd and thrillingly intimate.

12.18pm: And here's Paul Batchelor's review of the New Collected Poems, from earlier this year.

12.22pm: You can read a pair of poems by Tranströmer, - "The Couple" and "After a Death", both translated by Robert Bly in the 1970s - on The Owls website. We've just been in touch with Bloodaxe, and they're sending us a couple over for us to publish here - I'll link to them as soon as we have them.

12.27pm: Some words from permanent secretary Peter Englund (whom we're hoping to speak to later) about this year's winner:

"You can never feel small after reading the poetry of Tomas Tranströmer - he's also exquisite when it comes to language".

For people wondering where to start with Tranströmer, he recommends The Half-finished Heaven and the New Collected Poems. "Both of them are pure gold."

12.32pm: A couple of good blogs, passed on by my colleague Claire Armitstead.

The first compares his work with that of Pablo Neruda.

The second, interestingly, flags up the difficulties he presents to translators:

He writes an exceptionally pure, cold Swedish without frills. It's very hard to specify why it's not prose but you would have to be deaf blind and dumb not to recognise it as poetry. Mention of blindness brings up another problem. I find that he is a tremendously visual poet. To read him is to see what he describes. But how can this translate to people who have never seen a Swedish landscape, and don't know what the words refer to? That's not a question I can honestly answer, since I can't unsee ...

12.38pm: More from Peter Englund, courtesy of Alison Flood, who's in the middle of writing the news story:





Englund admitted the choice of a Swede could "perhaps" be seen as controversial internationally, but added that "one should also keep in mind that is soon 40 years since this happened": the last Swede to win the literature Nobel was in 1974, when the Swedish authors Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson took the prize jointly. "It's not that we spread

them around on Swedes each and every year," said Englund. "We have been quite thoughtful about this - we have not been rash in choosing a Swede." Although Englund said that Transtromer's production has been "sparse" - "you could fit it into a not too large pocket book, all of it" - the permanent secretary praised his "exquisite" language. "He is writing about the big questions -about death, hsitory, memory, nature," he

said. "Human beings are sort of the prism where all these great entities meet and it makes us important. You can never feel small after reading the poetry of Tomas Transtromer."

12.52pm: .... and here is that news story, from Richard Lea and Alison Flood, in full.

1.00pm: Comment from Neil Astley, head of Bloodaxe Books, which published Tranströmer's New Collected Poems:



"Some people talk about Tranströmer being an easy poet to translate - I think they are completely wrong," said Astley. "In Swedish he is very subtle, very musical and multi-layered. There is so much going on; he is deceptively easy." Astley called Transtromer a "very immediate" poet. "He is metaphysical and visionary but very particular, and very personal," said Astley. "He worked as a psychologist for most of his life, and all that pyschological insight is there in the poems. He writes about the border between sleeping and waking, between the conscious and the unconscious."

1.17pm: And that's it from us. We'll have more content as the day goes on, including poems from the New Collected Poems, and reaction from critics. Stay tuned for all of that, and happy Nobel day to you all.