Nobel Prizes

Nobel Prizes Literature

2000
The Nobel Prize in Literature
Gao Xingjian

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

2001
The Nobel Prize in Literature
V. S. Naipaul

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

2002
The Nobel Prize in Literature
Imre Kertész

"for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history"

2003
The Nobel Prize in Literature
J. M. Coetzee

"who in innumerable guises portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider"

2004
The Nobel Prize in Literature
Elfriede Jelinek

"for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power"

2005
The Nobel Prize in Literature
Harold Pinter

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

2006
The Nobel Prize in Literature
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"

2007
The Nobel Prize in Literature
Doris Lessing

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

2008
The Nobel Prize in Literature
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio

"author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization"

2009
The Nobel Prize in Literature
Herta Müller

"who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed"

2010
The Nobel Prize in Literature
Mario Vargas Llosa

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

2011
The Nobel Prize in Literature
Tomas Tranströmer

"because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality"

2012
The Nobel Prize in Literature
Mo Yan

"who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary"

2013
The Nobel Prize in Literature
Alice Munro

"master of the contemporary short story"

2014
The Nobel Prize in Literature
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"

2015
The Nobel Prize in Literature
Svetlana Alexievich

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

2016
The Nobel Prize in Literature
Bob Dylan

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

2017
The Nobel Prize in Literature
Kazuo Ishiguro

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

2018
The Nobel Prize in Literature
Olga Tokarczuk

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

2019
The Nobel Prize in Literature
Peter Handke

"for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience"

2020
The Nobel Prize in Literature
Louise Glück

"for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal"

2021
The Nobel Prize in Literature
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"

2022
The Nobel Prize in Literature
Annie Ernaux

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

2023
The Nobel Prize in Literature
Jon Fosse

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

2024
The Nobel Prize in Literature
Han Kang

"for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life"

2025
The Nobel Prize in Literature