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This is a guide to authors who have won a Nobel Prize for Literature. The reason for such a list is that the world of "serious" literature can be quite daunting, even for people who read a lot. Every year dozens of works of literary fiction are published, many of them borrowing from literary traditions or techniques that are somewhat oblique. But the authors that have won the Nobel Prize between its institution in 1901 and now kind of provide a skeleton upon which most modern current in literature are based. As you become familiar with these authors, a lot of what is happening in literature becomes more clear. Only, of course, not always: not every author on this list is important today, and not every important 20th century author won a Nobel Prize. The criterion for admission, and the omissions, of the Nobel Literature Prize committee, are a source of frequent debate, and I invite people to comment on it as they wish. An important thing to remember is that unlike other literary prizes, such as the Pulitzer and Man Booker, the Nobel is given to authors, not to works. There is no such thing as a "Nobel Prize winning book"...although some books obviously did a lot to cement their author's reputations. I will be breaking this list down into four sections, based on how common and important they are. The sections will be authors that are encountered by high school, authors that are encountered by college, authors that are encountered by graduate students or specialists, and authors that are very obscure and hard to find. Some of my groupings here might be subject to debate! Authors that most students will encounter in high school English classes, or that can be found in a thrift store. William Golding (1983) John Steinbeck (1962) Ernest Hemingway (1954) Authors that most students will encounter in college, or that can be found in an average small book store. Seamus Heaney (1995) Toni Morrison (1993) Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1982) Saul Bellow (1976) Samuel Beckett (1969) Jean-Paul Sartre (1964) Boris Pasternak (1958) Albert Camus (1957) Winston Churchill (1953) Bertrand Russell (1950) William Faulkner (1949) T.S. Eliot (1948) Herman Hesse (1946) Pearl Buck (1938) Eugene O'Neill (1936) Sinclair Lewis (1930) Thomas Mann (1929) George Bernard Shaw (1925) William Butler Yeats (1923) Anatole France (1921) Rabindranath Tagore (1913) Rudyard Kipling (1907) Authors that will have been read by someone possessing a graduate level or specialist knowledge, and whose works can be found in a large bookstore Alice Munro (2013) Mo Yan (2012) Doris Lessing (2007) Harold Pinter (2005) John M. Coetzee (2003) Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (2001) Gao Xinjiang (2000) Gunter Grass (1999) Jose Saramago (1998) Kenzaburo Oe (1994) Derek Walcott (1992) Nadine Gordimer (1991) I.B. Singer (1978) Heinrich Boll (1972) Pablo Neruda (1971) Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (1970) Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov (1965) Halldór Kiljan Laxness (1955) Andre Gide (1947) Henri Bergson (1927) Authors whose works are obscure, out of print, or that I don't personally know enough about to classify. Tomas Tranströmer (2011) Mario Vargas Llosa (2010) Herta Müller (2009) Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio (2008) Orhan Pamuk (2006) Elfriede Jelinek (2004) Imre Kertész (2002) Dario Fo(1997) Wislawa Szymborska (1996) Octavio Paz (1990) Camilo José Cela (1989) Naguib Mahfouz (1988) Joseph Brodsky (1987) Wole Soyinka (1986) Claude Simon (1985) Jaroslav Seifert (1984) Elias Canetti (1981) Czeslaw Milosz (1980) Odysseus Elytis (1979) Vicente Aleixandre (1977) Eugenio Montale (1975) Eyvind Johnson (1974) Harry Martinson (1974) (two prizes awarded this year) Patrick White (1973) Yasunari Kawabata (1968) Miguel Angel Asturias (1967) Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1966) Nelly Sachs (1966) (two prizes awarded this year) Giorgos Seferis (1963) Ivo Andric (1961) Saint-John Perse (1960) Salvatore Quasimodo (1959) Juan Ramón Jiménez (1956) François Mauriac (1952) Pär Fabian Lagerkvist (1951) Gabriela Mistral (1945) Johannes Vilhelm Jensen (1944) Frans Eemil Sillanpää (1939) Roger Martin du Gard (1937) Luigi Pirandello (1934) Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin (1933) John Galsworthy (1932) Erik Axel Karlfeldt (1931) Sigrid Undset (1928) Grazia Deledda (1926) Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont (1924) Jacinto Benavente (1922) Knut Pedersen Hamsun (1920) Carl Friedrich Georg Spitteler (1919) Karl Adolph Gjellerup (1917) Henrik Pontoppidan (1919) (shared prize) Carl Gustaf Verner von Heidenstam (1916) Romain Rolland (1915) Gerhart Johann Robert Hauptmann (1912) Count Maurice (Mooris) Polidore Marie Bernhard Maeterlinck (1911) Paul Johann Ludwig Heyse (1910) Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf (1909) Rudolf Christoph Eucken (1908) Giosuč Carducci (1906) Henryk Sienkiewicz (1905) Frédéric Mistral (1904) José Echegaray y Eizaguirre (1904) (shared prize) Bjřrnstjerne Martinus Bjřrnson (1903) Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen (1902) Sully Prudhomme (1901) Looking at those lists, the reader might notice something: a lot of the most popular and well known authors on the list are concentrated around the middle of the 20th century. There is a lot of politics and regionalism associated with the Nobel Prize. During its early years, it seemed to go disproportionately to Nordic writers, which makes sense given that the people giving the prize are Swedish. And during the past twenty or thirty years, the Nobel Literature Prize seems to be given to authors with certain political or social views, and also seemingly to redress the overwhelmingly European selection of the prize's early years. The prize has also, in recent years, been given to more experimental writers, and also to writers in formats that are not as popular to read (such as poetry). Not that I am claiming that the authors awarded the prize don't deserve it, or that the prize is given out for "political correctness" or only to "Ivory Tower types"  It is just that in the middle of the twentieth century, there was a bit more accord between what was considered to be the best writing and the most important writing. Of the authors on this list, I have read 27, which is probably a pretty high number. And even with that much exposure, I don't think I have ever seen a book by half of the authors on this list. This could be a regional thing, since I am in the United States. Some of these writers could be household names in Europe. I would like to hear what other people have to say, especially about the more obscure names on this list. Are these authors forgotten classics, or are the provincial writers whose time came and went? ETA: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/ is the official page of the Nobel Literature Prize, with links to materials about the author, and explanations of their selection. glowing-fish fucked around with this message at 04:09 on Mar 29, 2014 |
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Feb 17, 2014 02:47
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Florida Betty posted:Naguib Mahfouz is an absolutely amazing author, though I've only read two of his books because after each one I get depressed and cry for about a week, then I literally need a year or two off before I'm ready to face another one. I should be through the Cairo trilogy by the end of this decade. How did you discover them? Are they a writer that is of special interest in some field you are interested in, or are commonly known in a country you have lived in? Or did you just find them by chance?
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Feb 18, 2014 03:01
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Florida Betty posted:Naguib Mahfouz is one of the most famous Egyptian writers. I read excerpts from him in an Arabic class I took, but my Arabic isn't nearly at a good enough level to read an entire novel (of his, at least) so I read the translation. And thus my ignorance: I know very little of the writing of the Arabic world. I did study Chinese, which is why I am familiar with Mo Yan. That and I got one of his books at the Dollar Tree. As for Sinclair Lewis, I think I read two of his books as a teenager, and I probably paid one dollar for them at a Thrift Store. I don't remember much about them. Sinclair Lewis was very popular during his time, probably one of the most popular authors (other than Hemingway and Faulkner) to get the prize.
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Feb 18, 2014 04:03
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inktvis posted:Arbitrarily tying laureates to levels of education is only slightly less bizarre than suggesting Solzhenitsyn is more obscure than Anatole France, but less than Coetzee. It isn't levels of education as much as it is how familiar the general public is going to be with the writers, and also therefore how important these writers might be to understanding the "canon" of modern literature, as well as how accessible these writers might be to someone who is curious about learning more about literature. If someone wants to start reading these authors, it is going to be easier to find the works of Faulkner and Bellow, and easier to understand them, then to find the works of Karl Adolph Gjellerup. I could have been wrong on where specific authors were on the list, but I think the idea is sound. It also reflects differences in age and country. When I was a teenager in the 1990s, "The Gulag Archipelago" was a very easy to book find at second hand stores. I think this was because it was a popular book in the United States in the anti-communist 80's. But he might be much less well known outside of the US (and Russia, of course.)
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Feb 18, 2014 19:14
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Guy A. Person posted:
As an example of how popular Steinbeck was, he released "The Grapes of Wrath" in 1939, and the next year, it was made into a movie directed by John Ford and starring Henry Fonda, and it won two Academy Awards. So if we look at the winners of the past ten or twenty years, we don't see any of their books being turned into movies directed by Robert DeNiro and starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Of course, even Steinbeck was an outlier, but he was a popular writer of his time, as were many of the other writers who gained the Nobel Prize in the middle of the 20th century.
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Feb 18, 2014 21:47
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Guy A. Person posted:Fair point. Like I said Blindness (from a writer on the "obscure list") was turned into a film starring Julianne Moore but it didn't win any awards (and it was 13 years later). On your recommendation, I moved Saramango up the list from "Obscure" to "Speciality" There is a pretty good chance I just don't know enough about recent literature. If a few people can vouch that an author is well known in their circles, I can move them up the list.
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Feb 18, 2014 22:19
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Since he was recommended in this thread, and because he was available at my local, small library, I got a book by John Coetzee. "Summertime". Its a (faux)-memoir where a biographer interviews people who knew the late John Coetzee. Someone of an odd approach, I would say. I liked this book okay, and I won't say that Coetzee isn't talented or imaginative (although most of the thrust of his semi-faux-memoir is that he really isn't that visionary of a writer, etc.) Although this book is kind of evidence for what I see as the direction of the Nobel Prize: there used to be a fair amount of writers that got the prize that had a wide and broad influence. You can't understand any poetry in the past 100 years if you haven't read T.S. Eliot. But Coetzee, while good enough, doesn't seem to be a widely transformational writer.
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Feb 23, 2014 23:19
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Jeep posted:Nah, it definitely has. Pinter is a seminal playwright of the 20th century and I've seen him taught in numerous undergrad courses. I moved Pinter up a category. This thread has done a lot to expose my ignorance. I didn't really mean the lists to be a popularity contest, or a judgement. It was more along the lines of "you can probably find a copy of 'The Grapes of Wrath' more easily than you can find a copy of 'Independent People'"
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Feb 26, 2014 04:36
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Perhaps the best example of the prize being awarded for dubious reasons. In 1974, the prize was awarded between Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson, who beat out Graham Greene, Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow and Jorge Luis Borges. If the names of Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson aren't familiar to you, you probably aren't alone. However, they were very familiar to the judges that year, because they were on the prize-selecting panel.
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Mar 2, 2014 03:56
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Hedningen posted:
I read one of these ("The Snake Pit"), which I got for like 50 cents at a thrift store. It was sitting on the back of my shelf for two years, because it seemed like a slow read. I got around to reading it, and I liked it. As could be believed, it was a slow read, and it took some getting used to (19th century writer writing about medieval culture), but I did like it.
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Mar 3, 2014 03:18
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Thanks to this thread, I decided to read a book by Doris Lessing. I picked it out because it was the shortest book on the library shelves when I checked: Alfred and Emily. It is actually two books in one, the first being a fictional autobiography of her parents if World War I had never happened. The second book is her autobiography, or rather a series of vignettes about growing up in what was then Rhodesia. It wasn't particularly interesting to me, but I realized that she wrote it in her 80s, a decade after a major stroke, so it is probably not at all indicative of her work.
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Mar 29, 2014 04:18
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