Nobel Laureates for Literature: My Stats & Preferences

To follow up from my post on the Booker & Pulitzer Fiction Prize winners, I have decided to do a similar discussion post, but this time focusing on the Nobel Laureates for Literature, providing below my stats and winner preferences (I read roughly 42 Nobel winners out of some 119). The Nobel Committee has at times been accused of being political in its nominations and awards, and it is also important to bear in mind that such renowned authors as Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, James Joyce, Marcel Proust and Vladimir Nabokov never, as preposterously as it may sound, actually won this prize. Nevertheless, I applaud the recent trend to recognise the achievements of women in literature (as Olga Tokarczuk and Annie Ernaux were awarded the prize in 2018 and 2022 respectively).

Nobel laureates:

who are my FAVORITE authors:

Thomas Mann, 1929:

“principally for his great novel, Buddenbrooks, which has won steadily increased recognition as one of the classic works of contemporary literature”.

José Saramago, 1997:

“who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality“.

Orhan Pamuk, 2006:

“who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures”.

Albert Camus, 1957:

“for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times“.

Kenzaburō Ōe, 1994:

“who with poetic force creates an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today“.

Albert Camus

whose work I read and LOVED:

Hermann Hesse, 1946: “for his inspired writings which, while growing in boldness and penetration, exemplify the classical humanitarian ideals and high qualities of style“.

Knut Hamsun, 1920: “for his monumental work, Growth of the Soil“.

John Steinbeck, 1962: “for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception“.

Jean-Paul Sartre, 1964: “for his work which, rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, has exerted a far-reaching influence on our age.” (declined)

Yasunari Kawabata, 1968: “for his narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind“.

Bertrand Russell, 1950: “in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought“.

Mario Vargas Llosa, 2010: “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat“.

Kazuo Ishiguro, 2017: “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world“.

  • Hermann Hesse
  • Yasunari Kawabata
  • Bertrand Russell

———————————–

whose work I read and LIKED:

J.M. Coetzee

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Luigi Pirandello

Samuel Beckett

Toni Morrison

William Faulkner

Pablo Neruda

Rudyard Kipling

Gabriel García Márquez

Eugene O’Neill

Ernest Hemingway

Olga Tokarczuk

whose only SINGLE work I read and it was GREAT:

Dario Fo, 1997: “who emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden“.

Ivan Bunin, 1933: “for the strict artistry with which he has carried on the classical Russian traditions in prose writing”.

George Bernard Shaw, 1925: “for his work which is marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty”.

Rabindranath Tagore, 1913: “because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West“.

Mikhail Sholokhov, 1965: “for the artistic power and integrity with which, in his epic of the Don, he has given expression to a historic phase in the life of the Russian people”.

  • William Faulkner
  • Toni Morrison
  • Gabriel García Márquez

———————————–

whose only SINGLE work I read and it was OK:

Günter Grass

Nadine Gordimer

Patrick White

Alice Munro

Peter Handke

Boris Pasternak (declined)

Patrick Modiano

William Golding

Saul Bellow

Naguib Mahfouz

T. S. Eliot

Grazia Deledda

who are still on my TBR list:

Sigrid Undset

Annie Ernaux

Harold Pinter

Pearl Buck

Ivo Andrić

Elias Canetti

Miguel Ángel Asturias

Czesław Miłosz

Octavio Paz

Isaac Singer

Mo Yan

V.S. Naipaul

What do you think of the Nobel Laureate for Literature? Do you have your favourite winners, authors you would love to win or awarded authors you would love to read?

24 thoughts on “Nobel Laureates for Literature: My Stats & Preferences”

  1. Interesting post; I liked hearing who your favorites are and who you can’t believe was not nominated. I love Octavio Paz for his simplicity of language in his poetry. His story of life with an ocean wave is inspired. I cannot believe Maya Angelou never won the Nobel prize for literature for her poetry!

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  3. Я тоже люблю Томаса Манна и Орхана Памука.
    Еще я очень люблю Фолкнера. Это один из любимых мною авторов. Мне нравятся все его романы.
    Еще я довольно давно была очень впечатлена Джоном Кутзее. Больше всего растревожил меня и не отпускает до сих пор его роман “В ожидании варваров”.

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  4. I also love Thomas Mann and Orhan Pamuk.
    I also really love Faulkner. This is one of my favorite authors. I love all of his novels.
    I was also very impressed with John Coetzee for quite some time. What disturbed me most of all and still does not let go is his novel “Waiting for the Barbarians”.

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    1. Yes! Mann and Pamuk are amazing. I need to read more Faulkner.

      I reviewed Waiting for the Barbarians in May. I appreciate Coetzee’s narrative mastery, but I guess after years of reading existentialist literature, coming to his books now often feels for me like opening and reading a very old newspaper. I have just finished Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K, I suppose my review could have been more positive.

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      1. Appreciate your experience as a deep reader. It’s always interesting to read your posts.
        Coetzee discovered some things and sensations for me for the first time. So I can’t seem to forget it.
        But I didn’t try to read it. Perhaps it will be a completely different experience.

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  5. Nice list! I can recommend Sigrid Undset, I read Kristen Lavransdatter a few years ago and it’s brilliant, in fact I have been thinking about reading it again. I can also recommend Milosz, such a beautiful poet, and Louise Glück.

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  6. Crikey, Diana, you are way more widely read than I’ll ever be – I salute the range and quality you’ve covered just from this list!

    As for me I can only claim to have read a handful of authors – Mann, Hesse, Steinbeck, Sartre, Ishiguro, Kipling, García Márquez, Shaw, and Golding – and of these most are represented by just one work. I do intend at least intend some re-reads however!

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    1. You’ve read all the important ones, anyway! It is interesting that you mentioned Kipling. Like Galsworthy and Maugham, he is one of those authors for me whom I read such a long time ago (in my mid-teens) that I now wonder what impression their books would have on me now. Before starting this blog, I used to re-read books constantly, but now new books gets in the way. I suppose I am not alone in this “problem”.

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      1. I have a copy of Kipling’s Kim to reread sometime which I was given as a kid (more than half a century ago!) by my parents who were brought up in India; it’d be really interesting to see what I thought of it now as all I recall is a tale of derring-do in the deadly Great Game the British and Russians played at the height of their empires.

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  8. I have similar “loves” – Morrison, Steinbeck, Ishiguro, Hesse … not a fan of Lord of the Flies and I haven’t read any other Golding to assess. Also with Hemingway I have not been blown away by what I read, but that’s not much. This post makes me really want to read more of the authors. Thomas Mann and Orhan Pamuk are high on my list.

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    1. I do have another book by Golding on my TBR list – The Spire. I keep postponing reading it, don’t know why. Perhaps I assume its lesser popularity tells of its quality, something I shouldn’t assume. And, I think you would love Mann and Pamuk! I do recommend Pamuk’s earlier novels though (My Name Is Red/The Black Book), because his more recent ones (A Strangeness in My Mind/Nights of Plague) are just not as good as his earlier input, in my personal opinion.

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  9. Gosh, you’ve read a lot of them! My reading is quite insular and I rarely read books in translation, so more often than not I don’t know Nobel winners at all. From your list I’ve only read a handful, and have only really enjoyed Ishiguro, Morrison, some Steinbeck (hated some too, though) and Hemingway – all writers in English, of course.

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  10. Speaking of women laureates, I recently got Alice Monru’s short story collection, “Who Do You Think You Are?” I chose blindly. I just wanted to get a taste of her works, knowing she has dedicated her career to the short form. Nice post, though. I want to read The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, who’s the first on your list. Such a HUGE book.

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