Yevgeny Prigozhin rose from an ex-con hot dog vendor to winning lucrative Kremlin contracts and heading a formidable mercenary army.

Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami has hosted a ghost story reading event in Tokyo amid growing attention before the announcement of this year’s Nobel Prize in literature.

Nobel literature laureate Kenzaburo Oe, whose darkly poetic novels were built from his memories during Japan’s postwar occupation and from being the parent of a disabled son, has died.