The Nobel Prize for Literature is the world’s most important international literary honour. Alfred Nobel - the Swedish scientist, engineer, and inventor - left his fortune to establish awards for physics, chemistry, physiology/medicine, peace, and literature.
The prizes began in 1901, and the first winner for literature was the French poet and essayist Sully Prudhomme. The winner is decided by a committee consisting of members from the Swedish Academy, which was founded in 1786. The Swedish Academy features 18 people of note – such as writers, scholars, and historians - who have the role for life. The prize is awarded for a writer’s overall body of work although individual works of importance have been cited at times.
Past winners include Annie Ernaux, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus, Hermann Hesse, José Saramago, Pablo Neruda, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Swedish author Selma Lagerlöf was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1909.
The Nobel Prize looks for excellence in more than just fiction. Non-fiction authors (Winston Churchill and Bertrand Russell), poets (such as T.S. Eliot), playwrights (such as Harold Pinter and Nelly Sachs), a short story writer (Alice Munro), and even a singer/songwriter, Bob Dylan, have been honoured.
The 2025 winner is Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai, recognised "for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art." Krasznahorkai's work often engages themes of apocalypse, alienation, melancholy, and dystopian reality, and he first achieved major international recognition when he won the Man Booker International Prize in 2015. Other noteworthy novels include Satantango, The Melancholy of Resistance, and Seiobo There Below. Krasznahorkai is the first Hungarian author to win the prize since Imre Kertész in 2002.
*The list of winners shown below contains quotations sourced from nobelprize.org. Prizes were not awarded in 1914 and 1918.
