Next week, the Swedish Academy will announce not one Nobel literature laureate but two, as the prize seeks to move on from a year of unprecedented scandal. The head of the award’s committee is confident the prize can make a comeback by avoiding the “male-oriented” and “Eurocentric” perspective that has dominated judging in the past.

The Nobel prize in literature was postponed last year after a sexual abuse and financial misconduct scandal, which led to a series of resignations at the Swedish Academy, which runs the award. Jean-Claude Arnault, whose wife Katarina Frostenson was a member of the Academy until she quit in January over breaches of secrecy, was convicted of rape in October 2018 and jailed for two years.

With awards for both 2018 and 2019 set to be unveiled on Thursday, the Academy will be hoping that the Nobel’s return is well-received by the global literary community. Worth 9m Swedish krona (£740,000), the prize goes to the writer who, in the words of Alfred Nobel’s will, is deemed to have written “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”.

The Russian novelist Lyudmila Ulitskaya, the Guadeloupean novelist Maryse Condé and The Handmaid’s Tale author Margaret Atwood are all believed to be in contention for this year’s award, particularly after Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel prize in literature committee, revealed how criteria this year have changed.

Given that the last two winners – Kazuo Ishiguro and Bob Dylan – both write in English and just 14 of the 114 literature laureates are women, Olsson acknowledged this week the need for the jury to “widen our perspective”.

“We had a more Eurocentric perspective on literature and now we are looking all over the world,” he said. “Previously it was much more male-oriented. Now we have so many female writers who are really great, so we hope the prize and the whole process of the prize has been intensified and is much broader in its scope.”

Other names seen as strong contenders include Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai and Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, as well as perennial candidates Haruki Murakami and Ngugi wa Thiong’o.

“If there are going to be two [laureates], one has to be a woman.” said Fiammetta Rocco, culture correspondent at the Economist and the administrator of the International Booker prize, adding that “they’re likely to be from different continents”.

‘The grand queen, the empress, of Caribbean literature’ ... Maryse Condé. Photograph: Sophie Bassouls/Corbis via Getty Images

“Of the writers who deserve much wider readership,” said Rocco, “I would say Maryse Condé, the grand queen, the empress, of Caribbean literature. And in eastern Europe both Krasznahorkai and Tokarczuk would be on anybody’s list.”

According to Rocco, the exiled Chinese writer Ma Jian is also in the frame, alongside the Argentine César Aira and the South African author Antjie Krog, “part journalist, part broadcaster, part playwright, part poet – a great chronicler of the transition from apartheid to black majority rule and what it meant”.

An author writing in English would be an “unlikely” prospect, Rocco added. “But our own Neil Gaiman would be amazing. And I think anybody who’s making a list would put Margaret Atwood on it.”

The Swedish-Greek journalist and author Alexandra Pascalidou, who last year helped found the one-off New Academy prize in literature – won by Condé – to fill the void left by the Nobel, was also keen to see a female winner such as the “amazing” Antiguan-American writer Jamaica Kincaid. “Since the prize was founded in 1901 only 14 women have received it,” she said.

Maureen Freely, chair of English PEN and judge of this year’s International Booker, suggested the French author Annie Ernaux – who “writes in a genre all her own, defying the unwritten rules of the novel and the memoir to create new spaces for collective reflection” – and Colombian Juan Gabriel Vásquez, who “defies history itself, showing its official chroniclers to be charlatans and its actors to be lost in a maze of half truths”.

Jacques Testard of the British press Fitzcarraldo – which publishes 2015’s Nobel winner Svetlana Alexievich – said it was “great” to have the Nobel back. “Can Xue or Scholastique Mukasonga would be interesting choices. In Latin America I’d love to see someone like Elena Poniatowska get it. Closer to home, I’ll be rooting for the two authors we publish who the bookies seem to think are in with a shout: Olga Tokarczuk and Jon Fosse. And I’d like to think Annie Ernaux would be a worthy winner.”

It will take time to regain trust and respectability

For the Swedish Academy, Olsson is looking forward to Thursday’s announcement. “Two prizes in literature, that is something exceptional,” he said.”

Pascalidou believes this is only the start of a slow rebuilding process. “I think the Swedish Academy lost a lot with not only the accusations of sexual harassment and sexism, and the man who ended up in jail for rape, but also in how they handled the situation with their own members,” she said. “It will take time to regain trust and respectability. The catharsis has not occurred yet. The untouchable patriarchs are still ruling but I hope they learned something after the mess they caused. It was a manmade catastrophe that punished literature.”