
Nobel Prize for Literature
Established under the will of Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel and awarded annually for an outstanding body of work in the field of literature. The Nobel Prize for Literature is a "lifetime achievement award" and is never awarded for a single book, although you will see that some very good references get confused about this (such as the famous ecyclopedia which erroneously states online that Ernest Hemingway won the award for The Old Man and the Sea.) Save for the critical approval of posterity, the Nobel Prize is the most distinguished award bestowed upon a modern author of any nationality. However, as with any long-running award, it has its quirks. Literature Nobel laureates Winston Churchill and Bertrand Russell, for example, were great men in their fields, but their field wasn't really literature. And most modern scholars question the omission of James Joyce and Marcel Proust from the list. Despite these foibles it is not an award to be shunned, unless you're Jean-Paul Sartre, who refused the award in 1964.
Mo Yan
Tomas Transtromer
Mario Vargas Llosa
Herta Muller
Jean-Marie Le Clezio
Doris Lessing
Orhan Pamuk
Harold Pinter
Elfriede Jelinek
J.M. Coetzee
Imre Kertesz
V.S. Naipaul
Gao Xingjian
Gunter Grass
Jose Saramago
Dario Fo
Wislawa Szymborska
Seamus Heaney
Kenzaburo Oe
Toni Morrison
Derek Walcott
Nadine Gordimer
Octavio Paz
Camilo Jose Cela
Naguib Mahfouz
Joseph Brodsky
Wole Soyinka
Claude Simon
Jaroslav Seifert
William Golding
Elias Canetti
Czeslaw Milosz
Odysseus Elytis
Vicente Aleixandre
Saul Bellow
Eugenio Montale
Eyvind Johnson
Harry Martinson
Patrick White
Heinrich Boll
Pablo Neruda
Samuel Beckett
Yasunari Kawabata
Samuel Joseph Agnon
Nelly Sachs
Mikhail Sholokhov
Jean-Paul Sartre
Giorgios Seferis
John Steinbeck
Ivo Andric
Saint-John Perse
Salvatore Quasimodo
Boris L. Pasternak
Albert Camus
Juan Ramon Jimenez
Halldor K. Laxness
Ernest Hemingway
Winston Churchill
Francois Mauriac
Par F. Lagerkvist
Bertrand Russell
William Faulkner
T.S. Eliot
Andre Gide
Hermann Hesse
Gabriela Mistral
Johannes Jensen
Frans Sillanpaa
Pearl S. Buck
Roger Martin du Gard
Eugene O'Neill
Luigi Pirandello
Ivan A. Bunin
John Galsworthy
Erik A. Karlfeldt
Sinclair Lewis
Thomas Mann
Sigrid Undset
Henri Bergson
Grazia Deledda
George Bernard Shaw
Wladyslaw S. Reymont
William Butler Yeats
Anatole France
Knut Hamsun
Carl F.G. Spitteler
Karl A. Gjellerup
Henrik Pontoppidan
Romain Rolland
Rabindranath Tagore
Gerhart Hauptmann
Maurice Maeterlinck
Paul Heyse
Selma Lagerlof
Rudolf Eucken
Rudyard Kipling
Giosue Carducci
Henryk Sienkiewicz
Frederic Mistral
Jose Echegaray
Bjornsterne Bjornson
Theodor Mommsen