Nobel Prize for Literature

Awarded annually by the Swedish Academy to authors for outstanding contributions in the field of literature.

Discover the selection of winning titles we have in our collection.

2023
Jon Fosse
"for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable"

2022
Annie Ernaux
"for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory"

2021
Abdulrazak Gurnah
"for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents"

2018
Olga Tokarczuk
"for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life"

2017
Kazuo Ishiguro
"who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world"

2016
Bob Dylan
"for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition"

2015
Svetlana Alexievich
"for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time"

2014
Patrick Modiano
"for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the Occupation"

2013
Alice Munro
"master of the contemporary short story"

2010
Mario Vargas Llosa
"for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat"

2008
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio
"author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization"

2007
Doris Lessing
"that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny"

2006
Orhan Pamuk
"who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures"

2005
Harold Pinter
"who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms"

2001
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
"for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories"

2000
Gao Xingjian
"for an oeuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity, which has opened new paths for the Chinese novel and drama"

1999
Günter Grass
"whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history"

1998
José Saramago
"who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality"

1995
Seamus Heaney
"for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past"

1994
Kenzaburō Ōe
"who with poetic force creates an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today"

1993
Toni Morrison
"who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality"

1991
Nadine Gordimer
"who through her magnificent epic writing has – in the words of Alfred Nobel – been of very great benefit to humanity"

1988
Naguib Mahfouz
"who, through works rich in nuance – now clear-sightedly realistic, now evocatively ambiguous – has formed an Arabian narrative art that applies to all mankind"

1983
William Golding
"for his novels, which with the perspicuity of realistic narrative art and the diversity and universality of myth, illuminate the human condition in the world of today"

1982
Gabriel García Márquez
"for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts"

1978
Isaac Bashevis Singer
"for his impassioned narrative art which, with roots in a Polish-Jewish cultural tradition, brings universal human conditions to life"

1976
Saul Bellow
"for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work"

1973
Patrick White
"for an epic and psychological narrative art, which has introduced a new continent into literature"

1972
Heinrich Böll
"for his writing, which through its combination of a broad perspective on his time and a sensitive skill in characterization has contributed to a renewal of German literature"

1971
Pablo Neruda
"for a poetry that with the action of an elemental force brings alive a continent's destiny and dreams"

1970
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
"for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature"

1969
Samuel Beckett
"for his writing, which – in new forms for the novel and drama – in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation"

1962
John Steinbeck
"for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception"

1958
Boris Pasternak
"for his important achievement both in contemporary lyrical poetry and in the field of the great Russian epic tradition"

1957
Albert Camus
"for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times"

1954
Ernest Hemingway
"for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style"

1953
Winston Churchill
"for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values"

1949
William Faulkner
"for his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel"

1948
Thomas Stearns Eliot
"for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry"

1946
Hermann Hesse
"for his inspired writings, which while growing in boldness and penetration, exemplify the classical humanitarian ideals and high qualities of style"

1945
Gabriela Mistral
"for her lyric poetry, which inspired by powerful emotions, has made her name a symbol of the idealistic aspirations of the entire Latin American world"

1938
Pearl Buck
"for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces"

1936
Eugene O'Neill
"for the power, honesty and deep-felt emotions of his dramatic works, which embody an original concept of tragedy"

1932
John Galsworthy
"for his distinguished art of narration, which takes its highest form in The Forsyte Saga"

1928
Sigrid Undset
"principally for her powerful descriptions of Northern life during the Middle Ages"

1925
George Bernard Shaw
"for his work which is marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty"

1923
William Butler Yeats
"for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation"

1907
Rudyard Kipling
"in consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration that characterize the creations of this world-famous author"