Nobel Prize Winning Books [Every Winner Through The Years]
By Sophie Andrea · 26 June 2023 · 9 min read
The Nobel Prize for Literature is a prestigious award that is given to those who have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind in the field of literature in the prestigious year.
Since 1901, the Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to writers around the world, including songwriters, poets, and dramatists.
In this article, we’ll be taking a closer look at the books which have won the Nobel Prize.
Winners Of The Nobel Prize For Literature
We’ll be taking a look at the winners by decade and identifying some notable books from each era. You might also be interested in a list of books by genres or the best books of the decade 2000-2009!
Winners In The 1900s
1901- Sully Prudhomme
1902 -Theodor Mommsen
1903 - Bjornstjerne Martinius Bjornson
1904 - Jose Exhgaray y Eizaguirre
1904 - Frederic Mistral
1905 - Henryk Sienkiewicz
1906 - Giosue Carducci
1907 - Rudyard Kipling
1908 - Rudolf Christoph Eucken
1909 - Selma Lagerlöf
Winners In The 1910s
1910 - Paul Johann Ludwig von Heyse
1911 - Maurice Maeterlinck
1912 - Gerhart Hauptmann
1913 - Rabindranath Tagore
1915 - Romain Rolland
1916 - Verner von Heidenstam
1917 - Karl Gjellerup
1917 - Henrik Pontoppidan
1918 - Erik Axel Karlfeldt
1919 - Carl Spitteler
Winners In The 1920s
1920 - Knut Hamsun
1921 - Anatole France
1922 - Jacinto Benavente y Martinez
1923 - William Butler Yeats
1924 - Władysław Stanisław Reymont
1925 - George Bernard Shaw
1926 - Grazia Deledda
1927 - Henri Bergson
1928 - Sigrid Undset
1929 - Thomas Mann (If you like his works, definitely check out The Magic Mountain)
Winners In The 1930s
1930 - Sinclair Lewis
1931 - Erik Axel Karlfeldt
1932 - John Galsworthy
1933 - Ivan Alexseyevich Bunin
1934 - Luigi Pirandello
1936 - Eugene O’Neill
1937 - Roger Martin du Gard
1938 - Pearl Buck
1939 - Frans Eemil Sillanpaa
Winners In The 1940s
1944 - Johannes V. Jensen
1945 - Gabriela Mistral
1946 - Hermann Hesse
1947 - Andre Gide
1948 - T.S. Eliot
1949 - William Faulkner
Winners In The 1950s
1950 - Bertrand Russell
1951 - Par Lagerkvist
1952 - Francois Mauriac
1953 - Sir Winston Churchill
1954 - Ernest Hemingway
1955 - Halldor Laxness
1956 - Juan Ramon Jimenez
1957 - Albert Camus
1958 - Boris Leonidovich Pasternak
1959 - Salvatore Quasimodo
Winners In The 1960s
1960 - Saint-John Perse
1961 - Ivo Andric
1962 - John Steinbeck
1963 - George Seferis
1964 - Jean-Paul Sartre
1965 - Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov
1966 - S.Y. Agnon
1966 - Nelly Sachs
1967 - Miguel Ángel Asturias
1968 - Kawabata Yasunari
1969 - Samuel Beckett
Winners In The 1970s
1970 - Aleksandr Iseyevich Solzhenitsyn
1971 - Pablo Neruda
1972 - Heinrich Boll
1973 - Patrick White
1974 - Eyvind Johnson
1974 - Harry Martinson
1975 - Eugenio Montale
1976 - Saul Bellow
1977 - Vicente Aleixandre
1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer
1979 - Odysseus Elytis
Winners In The 1980s
1980 - Czesław Miłosz
1981 - Elias Canetti
1982 - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
1983 - Sir William Golding - 198
1984 - Jaroslav Seifert
1985 - Claude Simon
1986 - Wole Soyinka
1987 - Joseph Brodsky
1988 - Naguib Mahfouz
1989 - Camilo Jose Cela
Winners In The 1990s
1990 - Octavio Paz
1991 - Nadine Gordimer
1992 - Derek Walcott
1993 - Toni Morrison
1994 - Oe Kenzaburo
1995 - Seamus Heaney
1996 - Wislawa Szymborska
1997 - Dario Fo
1998 - Jose Saramago
1999 - Gunter Grass
Winners In The 2000s
2000 - Gao Xingjian
2001 - Sir V.S. Naipaul
2002 - Imre Kertesz
2003 - J.M. Coetzee
2004 - Elfriede Jelinek
2005 - Harold Pinter
2006 - Orhan Pamuk
2007 - Doris Lessing
2008 - Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio
2009 - Herta Muller
Winners In The 2010s
2010 - Mario Vargas Llosa
2011 - Tomas Transtromer
2012 - Mo Yan
2013 - Alice Munro
2014 - Patrick Modiano
2015 - Svetlana Alexievich
2016 - Bob Dylan
2017 - Kazuo Ishiguro
2018 - Olga Tokarczuk
2019 - Peter Handke
Winners In The 2020s
2020 - Louise Gluck
2021 - Abdulrazak Gurnah
2022 - Annie Ernaux
Nobel Prize Winning Books
As you can see, many different Nobel Prize winners have won awards for their work. However, as they’re praised for their career, narrowing down their must-read books can be hard.
That’s why we’ve found a collection of some of the most recent winners and a number of classics.
Happening is a memoir from Annie Ernaux that tells the story of her illegal abortion in 1960s France. She writes this forty years after her abortion, where she recounts her traumatic experiences with clarity.
Yusuf is a twelve-year-old who was sold by his father to repay a debt. Abdulrazak Gurnah writes a combination of coming-of-age, tragic love, and the corruption of African tradition through European colonialism.
As Yusuf’s story progresses, we see communities at war and trading safaris that don’t go according to plan.
In The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, a former soccer goalie turns to construction work as he wanders around an Austrian border town. After the Goalie murders a woman, he walks aimlessly, passively awaiting his fate.
Set in the mythical village of Primeval is about the life of the eccentric villagers.
Told as a fable, it explores the clash between modern and nature. With elements of magical realism, you can see the story of Primeval and the people who live there for many decades.
Klara is an AI who watches those around her and hopes she will one day be chosen to become an Artificial Friend. As she watches those around her, we explore what it means to love through the eyes of an AI narrator.
Scene of the Crime is a semi-autobiographical novella as Modiano recounts a dramatic season from his childhood.
In this novel, Jean Bosmans becomes aware of a series of disturbing coincidences that took place at his childhood home and those who seem disturbingly interested in his past.
He explores his memories, and the past and present collide in this detective novel.
Runaway is a collection of short stories about love, betrayal, and surprises. In one story, a woman is incapable of leaving her husband.
However, three more stories are about a woman named Juliet and the emotions that complicate her intimate relationships. Munro writes about women of all ages as she writes about these unforgettable characters.
In Red Sorghum, Mo Yan tells a tale that spans three generations. This novel focuses on a combination of family and myths, as a series of flashbacks depict the horror of the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s.
Seen as one of the finest political novels ever written, The Feast of the Goat focuses on Urania Cabral, who has returned to her native Dominican Republic.
In Trujillo City, one man terrorizes the nation, but his grasp is slipping, and a conspiracy to overthrow him is afoot.
In January 1945, Leo Auberg was deported to a Soviet Union camp, and it’s here that this story takes place. As the people in the camp are haunted by hunger, we see one man’s struggle as he spends five years in a coke processing plant.
Famous Nobel Prize Winning Novels
While we mention some of the most recent books that we enjoyed, there are a number of novels that are more famous than others.
A group of schoolboys are stranded on an uncharted island without any adult supervision. At first, they celebrate their freedom, but as the order around them collapses, they lose hope of adventure and rescue.
Due to the Great Depression, Tom Joad and his family travel west in search of the promised land. Set against the background of the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma, this is a novel about false hopes and broken dreams.
Stevens is a perfect butler, but after decades of serving at Darlington Hall, he embarks on a road trip to understand if the choices he made were the right ones.
Toni Morrison writes about Sethe, who was born a slave and escaped to Ohio. She is haunted by Sweet Home, a farm that is haunted by the many horrific things that happened.
Most of all, Sethe is haunted by her lost baby, who died without a name, save for a tombstone engraved with Beloved.
The Golden Notebook is about Anna, an author of a successful novel who keeps four notebooks. She swears to bring the threads of all these notebooks together to create a golden notebook.
Svetlana Alexeivich is a journalist who presents the personal accounts of the people of Belarus after the events of the Chernobyl Disaster in 1986.
Final Thoughts
There have been many Nobel Prize for Literature winners, but we hope that with this list of winners you have a place to start in your search for their books.
These writers have all been awarded for their work and their dedication to helping humanity through the power of their work.
If you would like to know anything else about other famous novels and what we think of them, consider looking at our site or go through our post on 100 greatest novels ever written. We’ll be able to offer a fresh perspective on any books you’re interested in.
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