The Nobel Prize for Literature is a prestigious award that is given to those who have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind in the field of literature in the prestigious year.
Since 1901, the Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to writers around the world, including songwriters, poets, and dramatists.
In this article, we’ll be taking a closer look at the books which have won the Nobel Prize.
Winners Of The Nobel Prize For Literature
We’ll be taking a look at the winners by decade and identifying some notable books from each era. You might also be interested in a list of books by genres or the best books of the decade 2000-2009!
Winners In The 1900s
- 1901- Sully Prudhomme
- 1902 -Theodor Mommsen
- 1903 – Bjornstjerne Martinius Bjornson
- 1904 – Jose Exhgaray y Eizaguirre
- 1904 – Frederic Mistral
- 1905 – Henryk Sienkiewicz
- 1906 – Giosue Carducci
- 1907 – Rudyard Kipling
- 1908 – Rudolf Christoph Eucken
- 1909 – Selma Lagerlöf
Winners In The 1910s
- 1910 – Paul Johann Ludwig von Heyse
- 1911 – Maurice Maeterlinck
- 1912 – Gerhart Hauptmann
- 1913 – Rabindranath Tagore
- 1915 – Romain Rolland
- 1916 – Verner von Heidenstam
- 1917 – Karl Gjellerup
- 1917 – Henrik Pontoppidan
- 1918 – Erik Axel Karlfeldt
- 1919 – Carl Spitteler
Winners In The 1920s
- 1920 – Knut Hamsun
- 1921 – Anatole France
- 1922 – Jacinto Benavente y Martinez
- 1923 – William Butler Yeats
- 1924 – Władysław Stanisław Reymont
- 1925 – George Bernard Shaw
- 1926 – Grazia Deledda
- 1927 – Henri Bergson
- 1928 – Sigrid Undset
- 1929 – Thomas Mann (If you like his works, definitely check out The Magic Mountain)
Winners In The 1930s
- 1930 – Sinclair Lewis
- 1931 – Erik Axel Karlfeldt
- 1932 – John Galsworthy
- 1933 – Ivan Alexseyevich Bunin
- 1934 – Luigi Pirandello
- 1936 – Eugene O’Neill
- 1937 – Roger Martin du Gard
- 1938 – Pearl Buck
- 1939 – Frans Eemil Sillanpaa
Winners In The 1940s
- 1944 – Johannes V. Jensen
- 1945 – Gabriela Mistral
- 1946 – Hermann Hesse
- 1947 – Andre Gide
- 1948 – T.S. Eliot
- 1949 – William Faulkner
Winners In The 1950s
- 1950 – Bertrand Russell
- 1951 – Par Lagerkvist
- 1952 – Francois Mauriac
- 1953 – Sir Winston Churchill
- 1954 – Ernest Hemingway
- 1955 – Halldor Laxness
- 1956 – Juan Ramon Jimenez
- 1957 – Albert Camus
- 1958 – Boris Leonidovich Pasternak
- 1959 – Salvatore Quasimodo
Winners In The 1960s
- 1960 – Saint-John Perse
- 1961 – Ivo Andric
- 1962 – John Steinbeck
- 1963 – George Seferis
- 1964 – Jean-Paul Sartre
- 1965 – Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov
- 1966 – S.Y. Agnon
- 1966 – Nelly Sachs
- 1967 – Miguel Ángel Asturias
- 1968 – Kawabata Yasunari
- 1969 – Samuel Beckett
Winners In The 1970s
- 1970 – Aleksandr Iseyevich Solzhenitsyn
- 1971 – Pablo Neruda
- 1972 – Heinrich Boll
- 1973 – Patrick White
- 1974 – Eyvind Johnson
- 1974 – Harry Martinson
- 1975 – Eugenio Montale
- 1976 – Saul Bellow
- 1977 – Vicente Aleixandre
- 1978 – Isaac Bashevis Singer
- 1979 – Odysseus Elytis
Winners In The 1980s
- 1980 – Czesław Miłosz
- 1981 – Elias Canetti
- 1982 – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- 1983 – Sir William Golding – 198
- 1984 – Jaroslav Seifert
- 1985 – Claude Simon
- 1986 – Wole Soyinka
- 1987 – Joseph Brodsky
- 1988 – Naguib Mahfouz
- 1989 – Camilo Jose Cela
Winners In The 1990s
- 1990 – Octavio Paz
- 1991 – Nadine Gordimer
- 1992 – Derek Walcott
- 1993 – Toni Morrison
- 1994 – Oe Kenzaburo
- 1995 – Seamus Heaney
- 1996 – Wislawa Szymborska
- 1997 – Dario Fo
- 1998 – Jose Saramago
- 1999 – Gunter Grass
Winners In The 2000s
- 2000 – Gao Xingjian
- 2001 – Sir V.S. Naipaul
- 2002 – Imre Kertesz
- 2003 – J.M. Coetzee
- 2004 – Elfriede Jelinek
- 2005 – Harold Pinter
- 2006 – Orhan Pamuk
- 2007 – Doris Lessing
- 2008 – Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio
- 2009 – Herta Muller
Winners In The 2010s
- 2010 – Mario Vargas Llosa
- 2011 – Tomas Transtromer
- 2012 – Mo Yan
- 2013 – Alice Munro
- 2014 – Patrick Modiano
- 2015 – Svetlana Alexievich
- 2016 – Bob Dylan
- 2017 – Kazuo Ishiguro
- 2018 – Olga Tokarczuk
- 2019 – Peter Handke
Winners In The 2020s
- 2020 – Louise Gluck
- 2021 – Abdulrazak Gurnah
- 2022 – Annie Ernaux
Nobel Prize Winning Books
As you can see, many different Nobel Prize winners have won awards for their work. However, as they’re praised for their career, narrowing down their must-read books can be hard.
That’s why we’ve found a collection of some of the most recent winners and a number of classics.
1. Happening By Annie Ernaux
Happening is a memoir from Annie Ernaux that tells the story of her illegal abortion in 1960s France. She writes this forty years after her abortion, where she recounts her traumatic experiences with clarity.
2. Paradise By Abdulrazak Gurnah
Yusuf is a twelve-year-old who was sold by his father to repay a debt. Abdulrazak Gurnah writes a combination of coming-of-age, tragic love, and the corruption of African tradition through European colonialism.
As Yusuf’s story progresses, we see communities at war and trading safaris that don’t go according to plan.
3. The Goalie’s Anxiety At The Penalty Kick By Peter Handke
In The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, a former soccer goalie turns to construction work as he wanders around an Austrian border town. After the Goalie murders a woman, he walks aimlessly, passively awaiting his fate.
4. Primeval And Other Times By Olga Tokarczuk
Set in the mythical village of Primeval is about the life of the eccentric villagers.
Told as a fable, it explores the clash between modern and nature. With elements of magical realism, you can see the story of Primeval and the people who live there for many decades.
5. Klara And The Sun By Kazuo Ishiguro
Klara is an AI who watches those around her and hopes she will one day be chosen to become an Artificial Friend. As she watches those around her, we explore what it means to love through the eyes of an AI narrator.
6. Scene Of The Crime By Patrick Modiano
Scene of the Crime is a semi-autobiographical novella as Modiano recounts a dramatic season from his childhood.
In this novel, Jean Bosmans becomes aware of a series of disturbing coincidences that took place at his childhood home and those who seem disturbingly interested in his past.
He explores his memories, and the past and present collide in this detective novel.
7. Runaway By Alice Munro
Runaway is a collection of short stories about love, betrayal, and surprises. In one story, a woman is incapable of leaving her husband.
However, three more stories are about a woman named Juliet and the emotions that complicate her intimate relationships. Munro writes about women of all ages as she writes about these unforgettable characters.
8. Red Sorghum: A Novel Of China By Mo Yan
In Red Sorghum, Mo Yan tells a tale that spans three generations. This novel focuses on a combination of family and myths, as a series of flashbacks depict the horror of the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s.
9. The Feast Of The Goat By Mario Vargas Llosa
Seen as one of the finest political novels ever written, The Feast of the Goat focuses on Urania Cabral, who has returned to her native Dominican Republic.
In Trujillo City, one man terrorizes the nation, but his grasp is slipping, and a conspiracy to overthrow him is afoot.
10. Hunger Angel By Herta Muller
In January 1945, Leo Auberg was deported to a Soviet Union camp, and it’s here that this story takes place. As the people in the camp are haunted by hunger, we see one man’s struggle as he spends five years in a coke processing plant.
Famous Nobel Prize Winning Novels
While we mention some of the most recent books that we enjoyed, there are a number of novels that are more famous than others.
1. Lord Of The Flies By William Golding
A group of schoolboys are stranded on an uncharted island without any adult supervision. At first, they celebrate their freedom, but as the order around them collapses, they lose hope of adventure and rescue.
2. The Grapes Of Wrath By John Steinbeck
Due to the Great Depression, Tom Joad and his family travel west in search of the promised land. Set against the background of the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma, this is a novel about false hopes and broken dreams.
3. The Remains Of The Day By Kazuo Ishiguro
Stevens is a perfect butler, but after decades of serving at Darlington Hall, he embarks on a road trip to understand if the choices he made were the right ones.
4. Beloved By Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison writes about Sethe, who was born a slave and escaped to Ohio. She is haunted by Sweet Home, a farm that is haunted by the many horrific things that happened.
Most of all, Sethe is haunted by her lost baby, who died without a name, save for a tombstone engraved with Beloved.
5. The Golden Notebook By Doris Lessing
The Golden Notebook is about Anna, an author of a successful novel who keeps four notebooks. She swears to bring the threads of all these notebooks together to create a golden notebook.
6. Voices From Chernobyl By Svetlana Alexievich
Svetlana Alexeivich is a journalist who presents the personal accounts of the people of Belarus after the events of the Chernobyl Disaster in 1986.
Final Thoughts
There have been many Nobel Prize for Literature winners, but we hope that with this list of winners you have a place to start in your search for their books.
These writers have all been awarded for their work and their dedication to helping humanity through the power of their work.
If you would like to know anything else about other famous novels and what we think of them, consider looking at our site or go through our post on 100 greatest novels ever written. We’ll be able to offer a fresh perspective on any books you’re interested in.
For instance, we have the Gentlemen of the Road Book review, and we answer questions like “Who are the main characters in Percy Jackson?” or “Is Life of Pi a true story?“
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