Thank you guys for opening the thread, I had expected the thread to open around June but found out it has already begun. This is the first time I'm going to comment on this thread so you guys are free to welcome my thoughts. Before I present my shortlist or rather preferred choices, I would like to introduce my literary taste.
If I were a Swedish Academy member, I would share the same taste with the polemical Artur Lundkvist, advocating for bold, experimental writers with themes of memory, whether collective or personal, power of language and literature in everyday life, and works raising existential questions. Among writers that fall into this category are Elytis, Hesse, Paz, Beckett, Soyinka, White. I'm not a fan of socialist/political writers (reasons why I don't really like No Yan and Ngugi). And with Gurnah winning the Nobel last year and based on the interview of Anders Olsson I read last year when he talked about looking outside Europe, I suspect the committee will follow the pattern of the early/mid 90s, recognising writers from different part of the world (the only continent missing out being Australia), sending signals that either Carribean, Latin America or Australia literature will have the last laugh come October. Ten or even fifteen years ago, my choices could've been Kundera, Adonis, Charles Simic, Poniatowska but due to their advancement in age (this is a very important, surprising, criteria, for it dismissed Ibsen in 1903, Thomas Hardy in 1923, Robert Frost in 1961, Pound/ E M Forster in 1968), I'll have to push them aside.
Homero Aridjis
Cesar Aira
Gerald Murnane
Jamaica Kincaid
Can Xue
Yoko Ogawa
Michael Ondaatje
Dubravka Ugresic
Jon Fosse
Anne Carson
By the way, the poem "Begin" is a very beautiful poem, just read the poem in its entirety.
Have you guys read Kjell Espmark's Nobel Literature Prize--- A New Century? It's a companion piece to his earlier volume on the Nobel Prizes that focused, this time, on this century's choices. The pdf file is on the Swedish Academy website.