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, a leader of the Modernist movement in poetry in such works as The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943). Eliot exercised...
American musician
Bob Dylan is an American folksinger 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 the intellectualism...
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 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 author, critic, and playwright, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. He wrote in both French and English and is perhaps best known for his plays, especially En attendant...
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...
American writer
Ernest Hemingway was an American novelist and short-story writer, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. He was noted both for the intense masculinity of his writing and for his adventurous and...
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,...
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...
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...
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 his wife, Juliette Rondeaux. His father was of southern...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Peruvian author
Mario Vargas Llosa is a Peruvian Spanish writer whose commitment to social change is evident in his novels, plays, and essays. In 1990, he was an unsuccessful candidate for president of Peru. Vargas Llosa...
Colombian author
Gabriel García Márquez was a Colombian novelist and one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 (see Nobel Lecture: “The Solitude of Latin America”),...
Nigerian author
Wole Soyinka is a Nigerian playwright and political activist who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. He sometimes wrote of modern West Africa in a satirical style, but his serious intent and...
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:...
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...
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...
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,...
Bengali poet
Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali poet, short-story writer, song composer, playwright, essayist, and painter who introduced new prose and verse forms and the use of colloquial language into Bengali literature,...
German writer
Hermann Hesse was a German novelist and poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. The main theme of his work is the individual’s efforts to break out of the established modes of civilization...
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...
American author
Saul Bellow was an American novelist whose characterizations of modern urban man, disaffected by society but not destroyed in spirit, earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. Brought up in a...
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...
American novelist
John Steinbeck was an American novelist, best known for The Grapes of Wrath (1939), which summed up the bitterness of the Great Depression decade and aroused widespread sympathy for the plight of migratory...
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...
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...
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...
American writer
Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist and social critic who punctured American complacency with his broadly drawn, widely popular satirical novels. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930, the...
American author
Pearl S. Buck was an American author noted for her novels of life in China. She received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938. Pearl Sydenstricker was raised in Zhenjiang in eastern China by her Presbyterian...
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...
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...
French author
François Mauriac was a novelist, essayist, poet, playwright, journalist, and winner in 1952 of the Nobel Prize for Literature. He belonged to the lineage of French Catholic writers who examined the ugly...
West Indian poet
Derek Walcott was a West Indian poet and playwright noted for works that explore the Caribbean cultural experience. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. Walcott was educated at St. Mary’s...
French writer
Anatole France was a writer and ironic, skeptical, and urbane critic who was considered in his day the ideal French man of letters. He was elected to the French Academy in 1896 and was awarded the Nobel...
American author
Toni Morrison was an American writer noted for her examination of Black experience (particularly Black female experience) within the Black community. She received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993....
French writer
Romain Rolland was a French novelist, dramatist, and essayist, an idealist who was deeply involved with pacifism, the fight against fascism, the search for world peace, and the analysis of artistic genius....
German author
Heinrich Böll was a German writer, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972. Böll’s ironic novels on the travails of German life during and after World War II capture the changing psychology of...