Nobel Prize in Literature Trivia
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58 free Nobel Prize in Literature trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Tolstoy never won it, Sartre tried to refuse it, Pasternak was forced to, and Bob Dylan took weeks to acknowledge it. This quiz covers the Nobel Prize in Literature from Alfred Nobel's 1895 will and the 'idealistic direction' clause through the Swedish Academy's 18 chairs, the February deadline, the five-name shortlist, the 50-year secrecy rule and the medal's Virgilian inscription. The bulk of the questions are about the laureates: Sully Prudhomme in 1901, Kipling the youngest and Lessing the oldest, Lagerlöf, Tagore, Sinclair Lewis and Pearl Buck as firsts, Karlfeldt's posthumous prize, Churchill and Russell, Camus, Beckett, Neruda, Solzhenitsyn, García Márquez, Soyinka, Mahfouz, Morrison, Gao Xingjian and Mo Yan, then the modern run from Munro and Alexievich through Ishiguro, Tokarczuk, Handke, Glück, Gurnah, Ernaux, Fosse, Han Kang and Krasznahorkai. Easy questions suit any reader; the expert tier asks for shared prizes and record nominations. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the prize and the individual laureates, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question. If you like this, try our quizzes on Alfred Nobel and on the Booker Prize.
30 of 58 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Alfred Nobel's will says the literature prize should reward outstanding work in what kind of direction?
Idealistic
Idealistic: the early Academy read it as a call for lofty, conservative idealism, one reason towering names such as Henrik Ibsen never won.
Q 02Nobel's will funded the prizes with a fortune made largely from which invention?
Dynamite
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.
Q 03Which French poet won the first Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1901?
Sully Prudhomme
Sully Prudhomme: he spent most of the prize money founding a poetry prize awarded by the Société des gens de lettres.
Q 04Who became the youngest literature laureate on winning the Nobel Prize in 1907, aged 41?
Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling: he accepted the Nobel, yet he repeatedly turned down a knighthood and declined to become Britain's Poet Laureate.
Q 05Who in 2007 became the oldest person to win the Nobel Prize in Literature?
Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing learned she had won from reporters outside her home as she came back from shopping, and replied, 'Oh Christ.'
Q 06Who was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1909?
Selma Lagerlöf
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.
Q 07Who in 1913 became the first non-European winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature?
Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore later renounced the knighthood Britain had given him in 1915, in protest against British policies in India.
Q 08Who was the first author from the United States to win the literature prize, in 1930?
Sinclair Lewis
Sinclair Lewis had refused the Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith, still upset that his earlier novel Main Street had not won it.
Q 09Who was the first American woman to win the literature prize, in 1938?
Pearl S. Buck
Pearl S. Buck, raised in China by missionary parents, later set up Welcome House, an agency for adopting Asian-American children.
Q 10Which laureate was awarded the prize posthumously, in 1931, after refusing it in 1919?
Erik Axel Karlfeldt
Erik Axel Karlfeldt had turned it down because he was permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, the body that awards the prize.
Q 11Which Soviet author was forced by his government to decline the 1958 prize?
Boris Pasternak
Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago had been refused publication in the USSR, so it first appeared in Italy, in 1957.
Q 12Which French philosopher refused the 1964 prize, saying a writer should not become an institution?
Jean-Paul Sartre
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.
Q 13Which British prime minister won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953?
Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill could not go to Stockholm, so his wife Clementine received the prize for him and read out his banquet speech.
Q 21Who was the first Japanese author to win the literature prize, in 1968?
Yasunari Kawabata
Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country and Thousand Cranes reached the West in Edward Seidensticker's translations, which helped win him the prize.
Q 22Which Belarusian journalist won the 2015 prize for her 'polyphonic writings'?
Svetlana Alexievich
Svetlana Alexievich's criticism of the Soviet and Belarusian regimes periodically forced her to live abroad, in Italy, France, Germany and Sweden.
Q 23Which Canadian short-story writer won in 2013?
Alice Munro
Alice Munro spent years trying to write the novel her publishers hoped for, but it never worked, so she stuck to short stories.
Q 14Which philosopher and mathematician won the 1950 literature prize on his first nomination?
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell was jailed for six months in 1918 for his anti-war activity, and wrote Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy in prison.
Q 15Which singer-songwriter won the 2016 prize 'for having created new poetic expressions' in American song?
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan stayed silent for days after the announcement, and a member of the Swedish Academy called him 'impolite and arrogant.'
Q 16Who in 1986 became the first African writer to win the literature prize?
Wole Soyinka
Wole Soyinka had been jailed for 22 months during Nigeria's civil war, after calling for a truce.
Q 17Which Egyptian novelist, author of The Cairo Trilogy, won in 1988?
Naguib Mahfouz
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.
Q 18Who in 1993 became the first African-American laureate in literature?
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison wrote her first novel, The Bluest Eye, while raising her two sons on her own after her divorce.
Q 19Which Paris-based playwright became the first laureate writing in Chinese, in 2000?
Gao Xingjian
Gao Xingjian condemned the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown and quit the Communist Party, and China then banned all his work.
Q 20What does the pen name of 2012 laureate Mo Yan mean in Chinese?
Don't speak
Mo Yan's mother kept warning him not to talk so much, which makes 'don't speak' an ironic joke at his own expense.
Q 24Which Italian playwright and actor won the 1997 prize?
Dario Fo
When RAI televised Dario Fo's Mistero Buffo in 1977, Rome's Cardinal Vicar denounced it as the most blasphemous show in TV history.
Q 25Which Latin American master of magic realism won the 1982 prize?
Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez broke off his law studies to work as a journalist.
Q 26Which British novelist won the 2017 prize?
Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro moved to England at five because his father, an oceanographer, had been invited to work at a research institute there.
Q 27Why was the 2018 literature prize not announced until 2019?
A sexual assault scandal
A sexual assault scandal around a member's husband led to resignations at the Academy, including its permanent secretary.
Q 28Which Polish writer received the delayed 2018 prize?
Olga Tokarczuk
Olga Tokarczuk's father ran a school library, and reading her way through it is where she found her love of literature.
Q 29The 2019 award to which Austrian writer drew protests over his support for Serbian nationalism?
Peter Handke
Peter Handke gave back the money from his 1973 Büchner Prize in 1999, in protest at NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia.
Q 30Which American poet won the 2020 prize for her 'unmistakable poetic voice'?
Louise Glück
Louise Glück overcame anorexia as a teenager through psychoanalysis, which she said 'taught me to think.'