PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: Nobel Prize in Literature
prime minister of United Kingdom
Winston Churchill was a British statesman, orator, and author who as prime minister (1940–45, 1951–55) rallied the British people during World War II and led his country from the brink of defeat to victory....
British logician and philosopher
Bertrand Russell was a British philosopher, logician, and social reformer, a founding figure in the analytic movement in Anglo-American philosophy, and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950....
American-English poet, playwright, and literary critic
T.S. Eliot was an American-English poet, playwright, literary critic, and editor who became a leader of the Modernist movement in poetry with such works as The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943)....
Irish dramatist and critic
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish comic dramatist, literary critic, and socialist propagandist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. (Read George Bernard Shaw’s 1926 Britannica essay on socialism.)...
American musician
Bob Dylan is an American folksinger and songwriter who moved from folk to rock music in the 1960s, infusing the lyrics of rock and roll, theretofore concerned mostly with boy-girl romantic innuendo, with...
American dramatist
Eugene O’Neill was a foremost American dramatist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936. His masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey into Night (produced posthumously 1956), is at the apex of a long...
American author
William Faulkner was an American novelist and short-story writer who was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature. As the eldest of the four sons of Murry Cuthbert and Maud Butler Falkner, William Faulkner...
Irish author
Samuel Beckett was an Irish playwright, author, and critic who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. He wrote in both French and English and is best known for his plays on existential themes, especially...
German author
Thomas Mann was a German novelist and essayist whose early novels—Buddenbrooks (1900), Der Tod in Venedig (1912; Death in Venice), and Der Zauberberg (1924; The Magic Mountain)—earned him the Nobel Prize...
Chilean poet
Pablo Neruda was a Chilean poet, diplomat, and politician who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. He is perhaps the most important Latin American poet of the 20th century. Neruda was the...
Irish author and poet
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet, dramatist, and prose writer, one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. Yeats’s father,...
French philosopher
Henri Bergson was a French philosopher, the first to elaborate what came to be called a process philosophy, which rejected static values in favour of values of motion, change, and evolution. He was also...
American writer
Ernest Hemingway was an American novelist and short-story writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. He was noted both for the intense masculinity of his writing and for his adventurous...
German historian, philologist, and legal scholar
Theodor Mommsen was a German historian and writer, famous for his masterpiece, Römische Geschichte (The History of Rome). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1902. Mommsen was the son of a...
French writer
André Gide was a French writer, humanist, and moralist who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947. Gide was the only child of Paul Gide and Juliette Rondeaux. His father was of southern Huguenot...
French philosopher and author
Jean-Paul Sartre was a French philosopher, novelist, and playwright, best known as the leading exponent of existentialism in the 20th century. In 1964 he declined the Nobel Prize for Literature, which...
Russian author
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was a Russian poet whose novel Doctor Zhivago helped win him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 but aroused so much opposition in the Soviet Union that he declined the honour....
Italian author
Luigi Pirandello was an Italian playwright, novelist, and short-story writer, winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize for Literature. With his invention of the “theatre within the theatre” in the play Sei personaggi...
British writer
Rudyard Kipling was an English short-story writer, poet, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, his tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for...
Peruvian author
Mario Vargas Llosa was a Peruvian Spanish writer who was one of the most influential authors of contemporary literature, particularly as a leading figure in the boom of 20th-century Latin American literature....
French author
Albert Camus was a French novelist, essayist, and playwright, best known for such novels as L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger), La Peste (1947; The Plague), and La Chute (1956; The Fall) and for his work...
American author
Toni Morrison was an American writer noted for her examination of Black experience (particularly Black female experience) within the Black community and for her poetic, luminous prose. Considered one of...
Russian author
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist and historian, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. Solzhenitsyn was born into a family of Cossack intellectuals and brought up...
Norwegian author
Jon Fosse is a Norwegian author of novels, plays, poems, children’s books, and essays, who has also worked as an instructor and a translator. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2023 “for his...
Nigerian author
Wole Soyinka is a Nigerian playwright and political activist who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. He was the first Black African to be awarded the prize and was cited by the Nobel Committee...
French author
Annie Ernaux is a French author known for her lightly fictionalized memoirs, which are written in spare, detached prose. Her work examines her memories, sometimes revisiting events in later works and reconstructing...
Colombian author
Gabriel García Márquez was a Colombian novelist and one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, mostly for his masterpiece Cien años de soledad...
German writer
Gerhart Hauptmann was a German playwright, poet, and novelist who was a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1912. Hauptmann was born in a then-fashionable Silesian resort town, where his father...
American novelist
Upton Sinclair was a prolific American novelist and polemicist for socialism, health, temperance, free speech, and worker rights, among other causes. His classic muckraking novel The Jungle (1906) is a...
Canadian author
Alice Munro was a Canadian short-story writer who gained international recognition with her exquisitely drawn narratives. The Swedish Academy dubbed her a “master of the contemporary short story” when...
Norwegian author
Sigrid Undset was a Norwegian novelist who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928. She is best known for her trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter (1920–22), which is considered a masterpiece of Norwegian...
South Korean writer
In 2024 Han Kang became the first South Korean author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Known for her experimental fiction and her works that address humanity’s capacity for violence, Han was cited...
American author
Isaac Bashevis Singer was a Polish-born American writer of novels, short stories, and essays in Yiddish. He was the recipient in 1978 of the Nobel Prize for Literature. His fiction, depicting Jewish life...
Turkish author
Orhan Pamuk is a Turkish novelist best known for works that probe Turkish identity and history. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006. Raised in a wealthy and Western-oriented family, Pamuk...
Tanzanian-born British author
Abdulrazak Gurnah is a Tanzanian-born British author known for his novels about the effects of colonialism, the refugee experience, and displacement in the world. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature...
German writer
Günter Grass was a German poet, novelist, playwright, sculptor, and printmaker who, with his extraordinary first novel Die Blechtrommel (1959; The Tin Drum), became the literary spokesman for the German...
Belarusian journalist and prose writer
Svetlana Alexievich is a Belarusian journalist and prose writer, a Russian-language author of meticulously crafted works of depth and introspection that provided a compelling and uncompromising portrayal...
British dramatist
Harold Pinter was an English playwright, who achieved international renown as one of the most complex and challenging post-World War II dramatists. His plays are noted for their use of understatement,...
Mexican writer and diplomat
Octavio Paz was a Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, recognized as one of the major Latin American writers of the 20th century. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. (See Nobel Lecture:...
British writer
John Galsworthy was an English novelist and playwright, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932. Galsworthy’s family, of Devonshire farming stock traceable to the 16th century, had made a comfortable...
French poet
Frédéric Mistral was a poet who led the 19th-century revival of Occitan (Provençal) language and literature. He shared the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1904 (with José Echegaray y Eizaguirre) for his...
Austrian writer
Peter Handke is an avant-garde Austrian playwright, novelist, poet, and essayist, one of the most original German-language writers in the second half of the 20th century. He was awarded the 2019 Nobel...
Chinese author
Mo Yan is a Chinese novelist and short-story writer renowned for his imaginative and humanistic fiction, which became popular in the 1980s. Mo was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature. Guan Moye...
Portuguese author
José Saramago was a Portuguese novelist and man of letters who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998. The son of rural labourers, Saramago grew up in great poverty in Lisbon. After holding...
Norwegian author
Bjørnstjerne Martinius Bjørnson was a poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, editor, public speaker, theatre director, and one of the most prominent public figures in the Norway of his day. He was awarded...
Belgian author
Maurice Maeterlinck was a Belgian Symbolist poet, playwright, and essayist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1911 for his outstanding works of the Symbolist theatre. He wrote in French and looked...
Japanese writer
Ōe Kenzaburō was a Japanese novelist whose works express the disillusionment and rebellion of his post-World War II generation. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994. Ōe came from a family...
Polish author
Olga Tokarczuk is a Polish writer known for her wry and complex novels that leap between centuries, places, perspectives, and mythologies. She received the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature (awarded belatedly...
South African author
J.M. Coetzee is a South African novelist, critic, and translator noted for his novels about the effects of colonization. In 2003 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Coetzee was educated at the University...
Russian author
Ivan Bunin was a poet and novelist, the first Russian to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature (1933), and one of the finest of Russian stylists. Bunin, the descendant of an old noble family, spent his...