Nobel Prize in literature - Definition and Overview

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

1910s

1920s

1930s

1940s

1950s

1960s

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s

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: Anna Akhmatova, Jorge Amado, Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Jorge Luis Borges, Bertolt Brecht, Paul Celan, René Char, 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, Robert Musil, Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell, Fernando Pessoa, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust, J.D. Salinger,Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Leo Tolstoy, Arnold Toynbee, Marina Tsvetaeva, 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)