58 Fun Facts About Nobel Prize in Literature

Alfred Nobel's will says the literature prize should reward outstanding work in what kind of direction?

Idealistic: the early Academy read it as a call for lofty, conservative idealism, one reason towering names such as Henrik Ibsen never won.

Nobel's will funded the prizes with a fortune made largely from which invention?

Dynamite: in a famous but unverified story, an 1888 French paper confused him with his late brother and printed a scathing obituary, spurring him to leave a better legacy.

Which French poet won the first Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1901?

Sully Prudhomme: he spent most of the prize money founding a poetry prize awarded by the Société des gens de lettres.

Who became the youngest literature laureate on winning the Nobel Prize in 1907, aged 41?

Rudyard Kipling: he accepted the Nobel, yet he repeatedly turned down a knighthood and declined to become Britain's Poet Laureate.

Who in 2007 became the oldest person to win the Nobel Prize in Literature?

Doris Lessing learned she had won from reporters outside her home as she came back from shopping, and replied, 'Oh Christ.'

Who was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1909?

Selma Lagerlöf used her prize to buy back Mårbacka, the family estate sold after her father's insolvency, and lived there for the rest of her life.

Who in 1913 became the first non-European winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature?

Rabindranath Tagore later renounced the knighthood Britain had given him in 1915, in protest against British policies in India.

Who was the first author from the United States to win the literature prize, in 1930?

Sinclair Lewis had refused the Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith, still upset that his earlier novel Main Street had not won it.

Who was the first American woman to win the literature prize, in 1938?

Pearl S. Buck, raised in China by missionary parents, later set up Welcome House, an agency for adopting Asian-American children.

Which laureate was awarded the prize posthumously, in 1931, after refusing it in 1919?

Erik Axel Karlfeldt had turned it down because he was permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, the body that awards the prize.

Which Soviet author was forced by his government to decline the 1958 prize?

Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago had been refused publication in the USSR, so it first appeared in Italy, in 1957.

Which French philosopher refused the 1964 prize, saying a writer should not become an institution?

Jean-Paul Sartre's refusal did not cancel the award: the Academy said it remained valid, so he is still listed as the 1964 laureate.

Which British prime minister won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953?

Winston Churchill could not go to Stockholm, so his wife Clementine received the prize for him and read out his banquet speech.

Which philosopher and mathematician won the 1950 literature prize on his first nomination?

Bertrand Russell was jailed for six months in 1918 for his anti-war activity, and wrote Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy in prison.

Which singer-songwriter won the 2016 prize 'for having created new poetic expressions' in American song?

Bob Dylan stayed silent for days after the announcement, and a member of the Swedish Academy called him 'impolite and arrogant.'

Who in 1986 became the first African writer to win the literature prize?

Wole Soyinka had been jailed for 22 months during Nigeria's civil war, after calling for a truce.

Which Egyptian novelist, author of The Cairo Trilogy, won in 1988?

Naguib Mahfouz was stabbed in the neck in 1994 by an Islamist extremist angered by one of his novels, and the nerve damage limited his writing.

Who in 1993 became the first African-American laureate in literature?

Toni Morrison wrote her first novel, The Bluest Eye, while raising her two sons on her own after her divorce.

Which Paris-based playwright became the first laureate writing in Chinese, in 2000?

Gao Xingjian condemned the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown and quit the Communist Party, and China then banned all his work.

What does the pen name of 2012 laureate Mo Yan mean in Chinese?

Mo Yan's mother kept warning him not to talk so much, which makes 'don't speak' an ironic joke at his own expense.

Who was the first Japanese author to win the literature prize, in 1968?

Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country and Thousand Cranes reached the West in Edward Seidensticker's translations, which helped win him the prize.

Which Belarusian journalist won the 2015 prize for her 'polyphonic writings'?

Svetlana Alexievich's criticism of the Soviet and Belarusian regimes periodically forced her to live abroad, in Italy, France, Germany and Sweden.

Which Canadian short-story writer won in 2013?

Alice Munro spent years trying to write the novel her publishers hoped for, but it never worked, so she stuck to short stories.

Which Italian playwright and actor won the 1997 prize?

When RAI televised Dario Fo's Mistero Buffo in 1977, Rome's Cardinal Vicar denounced it as the most blasphemous show in TV history.

Which Latin American master of magic realism won the 1982 prize?

Gabriel García Márquez broke off his law studies to work as a journalist.

Which British novelist won the 2017 prize?

Kazuo Ishiguro moved to England at five because his father, an oceanographer, had been invited to work at a research institute there.

Why was the 2018 literature prize not announced until 2019?

A sexual assault scandal around a member's husband led to resignations at the Academy, including its permanent secretary.

Which Polish writer received the delayed 2018 prize?

Olga Tokarczuk's father ran a school library, and reading her way through it is where she found her love of literature.

The 2019 award to which Austrian writer drew protests over his support for Serbian nationalism?

Peter Handke gave back the money from his 1973 Büchner Prize in 1999, in protest at NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia.

Which American poet won the 2020 prize for her 'unmistakable poetic voice'?

Louise Glück overcame anorexia as a teenager through psychoanalysis, which she said 'taught me to think.'

Which Zanzibar-born novelist won in 2021 for work on colonialism and refugees?

Abdulrazak Gurnah was forced to leave Zanzibar in the 1960s by the persecution of citizens of Arab origin, and settled in England.

Which French writer won the 2022 Nobel for uncovering "the roots... of personal memory"?

Annie Ernaux's parents ran a café-grocery in a working-class town, and the class divide she grew up with runs through her books.

Which Norwegian playwright, who writes in Nynorsk, won in 2023?

Jon Fosse nearly died in an accident at seven, an experience he says 'created' him as an artist.

Who in 2024 became the first Asian woman to win the literature prize?

Han Kang's family left Gwangju four months before the 1980 massacre there, which she later confronted in her novel Human Acts.

Which Hungarian novelist, author of Satantango, won the 2025 prize?

László Krasznahorkai's close friend, the director Béla Tarr, turned several of his novels, including Satantango, into films.

Which writer, born in French Algeria, won the 1957 literature prize at 44?

Albert Camus moved to Paris after Alger Républicain, the Algerian newspaper he wrote for, was banned.

Ernest Hemingway's 1954 citation singled out which recent work?

The Old Man and the Sea's author, Ernest Hemingway, was still in pain from two African plane crashes, so the US ambassador read his Nobel speech.

Thomas Mann's 1929 citation named which novel principally, rather than The Magic Mountain?

Buddenbrooks drew on Thomas Mann's own Lübeck merchant family, whose grain firm was liquidated after his father died.

The Swedish Academy was modelled on which institution?

The French Academy was the model, and Gustav III set up his own academy to develop the purity and strength of the Swedish language.

Archives opened in 2013 showed which American novelist won the 1962 prize as a compromise choice?

John Steinbeck beat Robert Graves and Lawrence Durrell, and one Swedish newspaper called his selection one of the Academy's biggest mistakes.

Which pair shared the 1974 prize, both members of the Swedish Academy itself?

Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson both began in hard jobs: Johnson drove logs and worked in a sawmill, and Martinson ran away to sea at 16.

Which of these may nominate a writer for the Nobel Prize?

A literature professor may nominate, but a nomination guarantees nothing: Graham Greene was passed over again and again and never won.

Which 1998 laureate spent his last years on the Spanish island of Lanzarote?

José Saramago moved to Lanzarote after Portugal's government blocked one of his novels from a European literary prize as offensive to Catholics.

Which Spanish philologist drew the most nominations of any writer in 1956, yet never won?

Ramón Menéndez Pidal lost out that year to a fellow Spaniard, the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, who had drawn a single nomination.

Which Roman epic poet's line is inscribed on the Nobel Prize medal for literature?

Virgil is said to have wanted the unfinished Aeneid destroyed, but the emperor had it published instead.

What does the literature medal's reverse side depict?

A young man writing down the Muse's song sits under a laurel tree, but the design wasn't ready in 1901, so the first laureates apparently received temporary medals.

Which Swedish Academy permanent secretary said in 2008 that 'the US is too isolated, too insular'?

Horace Engdahl's remark drew angry replies from American writers, and in 2009 his successor Peter Englund rejected the sentiment.

Which British playwright, an outspoken critic of the invasion of Iraq, won the 2005 prize?

Harold Pinter was in hospital and could not travel to Stockholm, so his Nobel lecture was pre-recorded and shown on video.

Which Swedish poet, who worked for decades as a psychologist, won the 2011 prize?

Tomas Tranströmer's 1990 stroke left him barely able to speak, and his later poems grew even shorter and more concentrated.

The Nobel ceremony falls on 10 December, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's what?

Death: Nobel died on 10 December 1896, and his relatives contested the will that created the prizes, which were first handed out five years later.

Which Turkish novelist won the 2006 prize?

Orhan Pamuk had been charged in 2005 with insulting Turkish national honour over remarks about killings of Armenians and Kurds, but the case was dropped.

Which Chilean poet-diplomat won the 1971 prize?

Pablo Neruda's family disapproved of his writing, but Gabriela Mistral, head of the girls' school in Temuco, took a liking to him.

Which Irish writer won the 1969 prize, cited for new forms in fiction and drama?

Samuel Beckett's wife called the news a 'catastrophe', and he stayed away from Stockholm, sending his publisher Jérôme Lindon to collect the prize.

Which Russian won the 1970 prize 'for the ethical force' of his pursuit of Russian literary tradition?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn stayed away from Stockholm in 1970 and collected the prize only at the 1974 ceremony, after the Soviet Union expelled him.

Knut Hamsun's 1920 prize singled out which 'monumental work'?

Growth of the Soil won Knut Hamsun the prize, and in 1943, as a Nazi sympathiser, he gave his Nobel medal to Joseph Goebbels.

Which pair shared the 1966 prize, both honoured for writing on Jewish life and destiny?

Agnon and Sachs shared it, and Nelly Sachs had arrived in Sweden as a refugee with her mother in May 1940.

Which Swedish playwright's 1911 nomination was withdrawn because it 'arrived too late'?

August Strindberg's admirers raised a national collection for an 'Anti-Nobel Prize', presented to him in 1912 by Hjalmar Branting.

Which laureate admitted in 2006 to serving in the Waffen-SS as a teenager?

Günter Grass made the admission before publishing his memoir Peeling the Onion, and Polish politicians urged him to give up his honorary citizenship of Gdańsk.