Time magazine will name its “Person of the Year” for 2018 in December.

The winner, who will appear on the cover of next month’s issue, is the person or group of people who, for good or ill, has come to embody the passing year by popular consensus.

The magazine’s editors ultimately choose their candidate, as they have every year since 1927, but an online poll has also been carried out since 1998 to assess the strength of public feeling about particular options.

Who are 2018’s candidates for the Time cover?

The options proposed on Time’s website for 2018 include Christine Blasey Ford, the California academic who presented powerful testimony before the US Senate alleging historic abuse at the hands of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who could also be said to represent the year.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is in contention as the figurehead of the “blue wave” that saw the Democrats take seats in November’s midterm elections.

Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, ultimately defeated at the ballot box, is another choice for casting light on the issue of vote suppression in her state.

Other potential cover stars include the film directors Jon M Chu and Ryan Coogler for their box office success Crazy Rich Asians and Black Panther, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos for becoming the wealthiest man in modern history and Meghan Markle, the American actress who married into the British Royal Family.

The full list offered in the accompanying poll also includes: Melania Trump, Brett Kavanaugh, Maxine Waters, Cory Booker, Jeff Flake, Susan Collins, Simone Biles, undocumented children, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Angela Merkel, Mohammed bin Salman, Donald Glover, Colin Kaepernick, Justin Trudeau, Pope Francis, Xi Jinping, Elon Musk, Robert Mueller, Carmen Yulin Cruz, Mark Zuckerberg, Emmanuel Macron, Stormy Daniels, BTS, Lisa Murkowski, Moon Jae-in, Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Michelle Obama, Ariana Grande, Jack Dorsey, Cardi B, Kim Jong-un, Kanye West, LeBron James, Mitch McConnell, Mike Pompeo, Rod Rosenstein, Aly Raisman, Kamala Harris, Serena Williams, the Thai cave divers, Lady Gaga, planet earth, Jair Bolsonaro and Sandra Oh.

Who were the recent winners?

In 2017, the accolade was given to the silence breakers, those women and men who came forward in the wake of the sexual harassment allegations against Hollywood movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and other influential celebrities to report their own experiences of abuse as part of the #MeToo movement.

Time paid tribute to the silence breakers “for giving voice to open secrets, for moving whisper networks onto social networks, for pushing us all to stop accepting the unacceptable".

In 2016, Donald Trump, then newly crowned president-elect, was named “for reminding America that demagoguery feeds on despair and that truth is only as powerful as the trust in those who speak it, for empowering a hidden electorate by mainstreaming its furies and live-streaming its fears, and for framing tomorrow’s political culture by demolishing yesterday’s.”

Predictably, Mr Trump believes he should be in contention again this year.

Prior to that, the previous list of winners was as follows:

2015 - Angela Merkel
2014 - Ebola fighters
2013 - Pope Francis
2012 - Barack Obama
2011 - The protester (demonstrators from the Arab Spring, Occupy and Tea Party movements)
2010 - Mark Zuckerberg
2009 - Ben Bernanke
2008 - Barack Obama
2007 - Vladimir Putin
2006 - You (the individual online content creator)
2005 - The Good Samaritans (wealthy philanthropists)
2004 - George W Bush
2003 - The American soldier (fighting War on Terror)
2002 - The whistleblower (informants from Enron, WorldCom and the FBI)
2001 - Rudy Giuliani
2000 - George W Bush

Independent

More about: Time-Person-of-Year