Civilisation/List of Nobel Prize in Literature laureates

1901	Sully Prudhomme	France	Poet and essayist
1902	Theodore Mommsen	Germany	principally for The History of Rome
1903	Bjornstjerne Bjornson	Norway	Poet
1904	Frederic Mistral Jose Eshegaray	France Spain	Poet Dramatist
1905	Henryk Sienkiewicz	Poland	Author of Quo Vadis
1906	Giosue Carducci	Italy	Regarded as the official national poet of modern Italy
1907	Rudyard Kipling	UK	First British winner. Born in British India. Youngest person to win the award (aged 41)
1908	Rudolf Christoph Eucken	Germany	Philosopher
1909	Selma Lagerlof	Sweden	First female winner. Gosta Berling’s Saga – debut novel
1910	Paul von Heyse	Germany
1911	Maurice Maeterlinck	Belgium	Symbolist playwright. Works include Pelleas et Melisande and The Blue Bird
1912	Gerhart Hauptmann	Germany
1913	Rabindranath Tagore	India	First non-European winner. Bengali polymath born in Calcutta
1914	Not awarded
1915	Romain Rolland	France	Supporter of Josef Stalin. Corresponded with Sigmund Freud
1916	Verner von Heidenstam	Sweden
1917	Karl Adolph Gjellerup Henrik Pontoppidan	Denmark Denmark	Both writers were associated with the Modern Breakthrough period of Scandinavian literature
1918	Not awarded
1919	Carl Spitteler	Switzerland	principally for Olympian Spring
1920	Knut Hamsun	Norway
1921	Anatole France	France
1922	Jacinto Benavente	Spain
1923	W. B. Yeats	Ireland	“for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation”. First Irish winner
1924	Wladyslaw Reymont	Poland
1925	George Bernard Shaw	Ireland	"for his work which is marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty"
1926	Grazia Deledda	Italy	Second female winner
1927	Henri Bergson	France	Philosopher
1928	Sigrid Undset	Norway
1929	Thomas Mann	Germany	principally for Buddenbrooks
1930	Sinclair Lewis	USA	First American winner
1931	Erik Axel Karlfeldt	Sweden	Died in April 1931. Awarded posthumously
1932	John Galsworthy	UK	principally for The Forsyte Saga. Second British winner
1933	Ivan Bunin	Russian empire	First Russian winner
1934	Luigi Pirandello	Italy	Author of Six Characters in Search of An Author
1935	Not awarded
1936	Eugene O’Neill	USA	Second American winner
1937	Roger Martin du Gard	France
1938	Pearl S. Buck	USA	"for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China". First female American winner
1939	Frans Eemil Sillanpaa	Finland
1940	Not awarded
1941	Not awarded
1942	Not awarded
1943	Not awarded
1944	Johannes V. Jensen	Denmark
1945	Gabriela Mistral	Chile	First Latin American winner
1946	Hermann Hesse	Germany	Also had Swiss citizenship
1947	Andre Gide	France
1948	T.S. Eliot	UK	"for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry". Born in St. Louis, Missouri
1949	William Faulkner	USA	Considered the greatest writer of Southern literature
1950	Bertrand Russell	UK	Mathematician, philosopher, and logician
1951	Par Lagerkvist	Sweden
1952	Francois Mauriac	France
1953	Winston Churchill	UK	"for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values"
1954	Ernest Hemingway	USA	principally for The Old Man and the Sea
1955	Halldor Laxness	Iceland	First Nobel Prize winner from Iceland
1956	Juan Ramon Jimenez	Spain
1957	Albert Camus	France	Born in French Algeria. First African-born winner
1958	Boris Pasternak	Soviet Union	Forced to decline the prize by the Soviet Union
1959	Salvatore Quasimodo	Italy	for his lyrical poetry
1960	Saint-John Perse	France	French diplomat from 1914 to 1940
1961	Ivo Andric	Yugoslavia	Born in Austria-Hungary, modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina
1962	John Steinbeck	USA	Steinbeck was a "compromise choice" as there were no obvious candidates
1963	Georgos Seferis	Greece	Born in the Ottoman Empire. Greek Ambassador to the UK from 1957 to 1962
1964	John-Paul Sartre	France	Attempted to refuse the award, saying that he always declined official honours and that "a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution"
1965	Mikhail Sholokhov	Soviet Union	Principally for And Quiet Flows the Don
1966	Shmuel Yosef Agnon Nelly Sachs	Israel Germany	for their works about the Jewish people
1967	Miguel Angel Asturias	Guatemala	poet-diplomat, novelist, and playwright
1968	Yasunari Kawabata	Japan	First Japanese winner
1969	Samuel Beckett	Ireland	Lived in Paris, and wrote in both French and English
1970	Alexander Solzhenitsyn	Russia	helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union, in particular the Gulag system
1971	Pablo Neruda	Chile	Considered the national poet of Chile
1972	Heinrich Boll	West Germany
1973	Patrick White	Australia	First Australian winner. Born in London
1974	Eyvind Johnson Harry Martinson	Sweden Sweden
1975	Eugenio Montale	Italy
1976	Saul Bellow	USA	is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times. Born in Canada
1977	Vicente Aleixandre	Spain	was part of the Generation of '27
1978	Isaac Bashevis Singer	USA	wrote and published first in Yiddish. Born in Poland
1979	Odysseas Elytis	Greece
1980	Czeslaw Milosz	Poland	Born in the Russian empire
1981	Elias Canetti	Bulgaria	moved to England to escape Nazi persecution and became a British citizen in 1952
1982	Gabriel Garcia Marquez	Colombia	popularised the literary style known as magic realism
1983	William Golding	UK
1984	Jaroslav Siefert	Czechoslovakia
1985	Claude Simon	France	Born in Madagascar
1986	Wole Soyinka	Nigeria	First winner from sub-Saharan Africa
1987	Joseph Brodsky	Soviet Union	was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972, settling in the United States
1988	Naguib Mahfouz	Egypt	First Arab writer to win
1989	Camilo Jose Cela	Spain	was associated with the Generation of '36 movement.
1990	Octavio Paz	Mexico	Poet and diplomat
1991	Nadine Gordimer	South Africa	First South African winner. Her writing dealt with moral and racial issues, particularly apartheid
1992	Derek Walcott	Saint Lucia	Author of the epic poem Omeros
1993	Toni Morrison	USA	First Afro-American winner
1994	Kenzaburo Oe	Japan
1995	Seamus Heaney	Ireland	District and Circle won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2006
1996	Wislawa Szymborska	Poland
1997	Dario Fo	Italy	"who emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority"
1998	Jose Saramago	Portugal
1999	Gunter Grass	Germany	Born in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland
2000	Gao Xingjian	China	has been a French citizen since 1998
2001	V.S. Naipaul	UK	Born in Trinidad
2002	Imre Kertesz	Hungary	His works deal with themes of the Holocaust
2003	J.M. Coetzee	South Africa	Has been an Australian citizen since 2006
2004	Elfriede Jelinek	Austria
2005	Harold Pinter	UK	"who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms"
2006	Orhan Pamuk	Turkey	First Turkish Nobel laureate
2007	Doris Lessing	UK	Born in Iran, moved to Zimbabwe, where she remained until moving to England in 1949. Oldest winner (aged 87)
2008	J.M.G. Le Clezio	France
2009	Herta Muller	Germany	Born in Romania. Many of her works are told from the viewpoint of the German minority in Romania
2010	Mario Vargas Llosa	Peru
2011	Tomas Transtromer	Sweden
2012	Mo Yan	China	Pen name of Guan Moye. Author of Red Sorghum
2013	Alice Munro	Canada	Short stories, mostly set in Huron County, Ontario
2014	Patrick Modiano	France	Many works about the Occupation of France in World War II
2015	Svetlana Alexievich	Belarus	Her books trace the emotional history of the Soviet Union through collages of interviews. Born in Ukraine
2016	Bob Dylan	USA	"for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition"
2017	Kazuo Ishiguro	UK	Born in Japan. UK citizen since 1983
2018	Olga Tokarczuk	Poland
2019	Peter Handke	Austria
2020	Louise Gluck	USA	US Poet Laureate from 2003 to 2004
2021	Abdulrazak Gurnah	UK	moved to the UK in the 1960s as a refugee during the Zanzibar Revolution
2022	Annie Ernaux	France
2023	Jon Fosse	Norway
2024	Han Kang	South Korea	First female Asian winner