Online Encyclopedia
Nobel Prize in Literature
The Nobel Prize in literature is awarded annually to an author from any country who has produced "the most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency". The "work" in this case generally refers to an author's work as a whole, not to any individual work, though individual works are sometimes cited in the awards. The Swedish Academy decides who, if anyone, will receive the prize in any given year.
List of Nobel Prize laureates in Literature from 1901 to the present day.
1900s - 1910s - 1920s - 1930s - 1940s - 1950s - 1960s - 1970s - 1980s - 1990s - 2000s
1900s
Year | Name | Country |
---|---|---|
1901 | Sully Prudhomme | France |
1902 | Theodor Mommsen | Germany |
1903 | Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson | Norway |
1904 | Frédéric Mistral | France |
José Echegaray y Eizaguirre | Spain | |
1905 | Henryk Sienkiewicz | Poland |
1906 | Giosuè Carducci | Italy |
1907 | Rudyard Kipling | United Kingdom |
1908 | Rudolf Christoph Eucken | Germany |
1909 | Selma Lagerlöf | Sweden |
1910s
Year | Name | Country |
---|---|---|
1910 | Paul Johann Ludwig Heyse | Germany |
1911 | Count Maurice Maeterlinck | Belgium |
1912 | Gerhart Hauptmann | Germany |
1913 | Sir Rabindranath Tagore | India |
1915 | Romain Rolland | France |
1916 | Carl Gustaf Verner von Heidenstam | Sweden |
1917 | Karl Adolph Gjellerup | Denmark |
Henrik Pontoppidan | Denmark | |
1919 | Carl Spitteler | Switzerland |
1920s
Year | Name | Country |
---|---|---|
1920 | Knut Hamsun | Norway |
1921 | Anatole France | France |
1922 | Jacinto Benavente | Spain |
1923 | William Butler Yeats | Ireland |
1924 | Władysław Reymont | Poland |
1925 | George Bernard Shaw | Ireland |
1926 | Grazia Deledda | Italy |
1927 | Henri Bergson | France |
1928 | Sigrid Undset | Norway |
1929 | Thomas Mann | Germany |
1930s
Year | Name | Country |
---|---|---|
1930 | Sinclair Lewis | United States |
1931 | Erik Axel Karlfeldt | Sweden |
1932 | John Galsworthy | United Kingdom |
1933 | Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin | Russia |
1934 | Luigi Pirandello | Italy |
1936 | Eugene O'Neill | United States |
1937 | Roger Martin du Gard | France |
1938 | Pearl S. Buck | United States |
1939 | Frans Eemil Sillanpää | Finland |
1940s
Year | Name | Country |
---|---|---|
1944 | Johannes Vilhelm Jensen | Denmark |
1945 | Gabriela Mistral | Chile |
1946 | Hermann Hesse | Switzerland |
1947 | André Gide | France |
1948 | T. S. Eliot | United States |
1949 | William Faulkner | United States |
1950s
Year | Name | Country |
---|---|---|
1950 | Bertrand Russell | United Kingdom |
1951 | Pär Lagerkvist | Sweden |
1952 | François Mauriac | France |
1953 | Sir Winston Churchill | United Kingdom |
1954 | Ernest Hemingway | United States |
1955 | Halldór Laxness | Iceland |
1956 | Juan Ramón Jiménez | Spain |
1957 | Albert Camus | France |
1958 | Boris Pasternak (Борис Леонидович Пастернак) | Russia |
1959 | Salvatore Quasimodo | Italy |
1960s
Year | Name | Country |
---|---|---|
1960 | Perse Saint-John | France |
1961 | Ivo Andric | Yugoslavia |
1962 | John Steinbeck | United States |
1963 | Giorgos Seferis | Greece |
1964 | Jean-Paul Sartre (declined the prize) | France |
1965 | Michail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov (Михаил Александрович Шолохов) | Russia |
1966 | Shmuel Yosef Agnon | Israel |
Nelly Sachs | Germany | |
1967 | Miguel Ángel Asturias | Guatemala |
1968 | Yasunari Kawabata | Japan |
1969 | Samuel Beckett | Ireland |
1970s
Year | Name | Country |
---|---|---|
1970 | Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn (Алекса́ндр Иса́евич Солжени́цын) | Russia |
1971 | Pablo Neruda | Chile |
1972 | Heinrich Böll | Germany |
1973 | Patrick White | Australia |
1974 | Eyvind Johnson | Sweden |
Harry Martinson | Sweden | |
1975 | Eugenio Montale | Italy |
1976 | Saul Bellow | Canada/United States |
1977 | Vicente Aleixandre | Spain |
1978 | Isaac Bashevis Singer | United States |
1979 | Odysseas Elytis | Greece |
1980s
Year | Name | Country |
---|---|---|
1980 | Czesław Miłosz | Poland/United States |
1981 | Elias Canetti | United Kingdom |
1982 | Gabriel García Márquez | Colombia |
1983 | William Golding | United Kingdom |
1984 | Jaroslav Seifert | Czechoslovakia |
1985 | Claude Simon | France |
1986 | Wole Soyinka | Nigeria |
1987 | Joseph Brodsky | Russia-United States |
1988 | Naguib Mahfouz | Egypt |
1989 | Camilo José Cela | Spain |
1990s
Year | Name | Country |
---|---|---|
1990 | Octavio Paz | Mexico |
1991 | Nadine Gordimer | South Africa |
1992 | Derek Walcott | St. Lucia |
1993 | Toni Morrison | United States |
1994 | Kenzaburo Oe (大江 健三郎) | Japan |
1995 | Seamus Heaney | Ireland |
1996 | Wisława Szymborska | Poland |
1997 | Dario Fo | Italy |
1998 | José Saramago | Portugal |
1999 | Günter Grass | Germany |
2000s
Year | Name | Country |
---|---|---|
2000 | Gao Xingjian (高行健) | France |
2001 | Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul | United Kingdom |
2002 | Imre Kertész | Hungary |
2003 | John Maxwell Coetzee | South Africa |
2004 | Elfriede Jelinek | Austria |
Notes
- The women who have received the Nobel Prize for Literature are Selma Lagerlöf, Grazia Deledda, Sigrid Undset, Pearl S. Buck, Gabriela Mistral, Nelly Sachs, Nadine Gordimer, Toni Morrison, Wisława Szymborska and Elfriede Jelinek. The other recipients are men.
- The Nobel Prize is not the sole measure of literary excellence and lasting worth. The following people, for instance, were not awarded the Nobel Prize despite being eligible: Jorge Amado, Jorge Luis Borges, Bertolt Brecht, Anton Chekhov, Joseph Conrad, Julio Cortázar, Jacques Derrida, Lion Feuchtwanger, Robert Frost, Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, Henrik Ibsen, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Nikos Kazantzakis, D.H. Lawrence, Alberto Moravia, Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell, Fernando Pessoa, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust, J.D. Salinger, Oswald Spengler, Wallace Stevens, Leo Tolstoy, Arnold Toynbee, Mark Twain, William Carlos Williams, and Virginia Woolf.
External links
- http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/index.html
- Nobel Prize Winners in Literature http://www.nobelprizes.com/nobel/literature
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Last updated: 03-18-2005 11:16:12