In the next few years, I’d like to read at least one work by each Nobel laureate in literature and write a short reflection on my reading. I have already read works by a few of them. Depending on how well I remember those books, I may either re-read them or write reflections now about works I read a while ago.
I’m not doing this project because I think the Nobel prize winners wrote the best literature of the last 110 years, which I’m sure they didn’t, but because I think it will be an interesting trip through literary history. I read a fair amount, but the majority is from the perspective of English speakers, usually from the US, and with a bias towards newer works. I think that reading Nobel laureates will help me broaden my literary experience, especially in the northern European direction, and might help me understand some of the controversy surrounding some of the choices.
I don’t have a systematic plan for what order I’ll be going in. I’ll just read whatever is available and appeals to me at a particular time. And I’m not going to confine all my reading to Nobel laureates. I’ll probably read a few other books in between each one of these. If I read a Nobel book a month, it’ll take roughly 10 years to finish this, but I might try to read them a bit faster than that. As I read and write, I’ll post links to my reflections on this page. I’ll also update the list of laureates as more are added.
1901: Sully Prudhomme
1902: Theodor Mommsen
1903: Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
1904: Frédéric Mistral; José Echegaray
1905: Henryk Sienkiewicz
1906: Giosuè Carducci
1907: Rudyard Kipling, Kim
1908: Rudolf Christoph Eucken
1909: Selma Lagerlöf
1910: Paul von Heyse
1911: Maurice Maeterlinck
1912: Gerhart Hauptmann
1913: Rabindranath Tagore
1915: Romain Rolland
1916: Verner von Heidenstam
1917: Karl Adolph Gjellerup; Henrik Pontoppidan
1919: Carl Spitteler
1920: Knut Hamsun
1921: Anatole France
1922: Jacinto Benavente
1923: William Butler Yeats
1924: Władysław Reymont
1925: George Bernard Shaw
1926: Grazia Deledda
1927: Henri Bergson
1928: Sigrid Undset
1929: Thomas Mann, The Transposed Heads,
1930: Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt
1931: Erik Axel Karlfeldt
1932: John Galsworthy
1933: Ivan Bunin
1934: Luigi Pirandello
1936: Eugene O’Neill
1937: Roger Martin du Gard
1938: Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth
1939: Frans Eemil Silanpää
1944: Johannes Vilhelm Jensen
1945: Gabriela Mistral, Selected Prose and Prose-Poems
1946: Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
1947: André Gide
1948: T.S. Eliot
1949: William Faulkner
1950: Bertrand Russel
1951: Pär Lagerkvist
1952: François Mauriac
1953: Winston Churchill
1954: Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
1955: Halldór Laxness
1956: Juan Ramón Jiménez
1957: Albert Camus
1958: Boris Pasternak
1959: Salvatore Quasimodo
1960: Saint-John Perse
1961: Ivo Andrić
1962: John Steinbeck
1963: Giorgos Seferis
1964: Jean-Paul Sartre
1965: Mikhail Sholokhov
1966: Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Nelly Sachs
1967: Miguel Ángel Asturias
1968: Yasunari Kawabata
1969: Samuel Beckett
1970: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
1971: Pablo Neruda
1972: Heinrich Böll
1973: Patrick White
1974: Eyvind Johnson; Harry Martinson
1975: Eugenio Montale
1976: Saul Bellow
1977: Vicente Aleixandre
1978: Isaac Bashevis Singer
1979: Odysseas Elytis
1980: Czesław Miłosz
1981: Elias Canetti
1982: Gabriel García Márquez
1983: William Golding, Lord of the Flies
1984: Jaroslav Seifert
1985: Claude Simon
1986: Wole Soyinka
1987: Joseph Brodsky
1988: Naguib Mahfouz
1989: Camilo José Cela
1990: Octavio Paz
1991: Nadine Gordimer
1992: Derek Walcott
1993: Toni Morrison, Sula
1994: Kenzaburō Ōe, Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness
1995: Seamus Heaney
1996: Wisława Szymborska, View with a Grain of Sand
1997: Dario Fo
1998: José Saramago, Blindness
1999: Günter Grass
2000: Gao Xingjian
2001: V.S. Naipaul
2002: Imre Kertész
2003: J.M. Coetzee
2004: Elifriede Jelinek
2005: Harold Pinter
2006: Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red
2007: Doris Lessing
2008: J.M.G. Le Clézio
2009: Herta Müller
2010: Mario Vargas Llosa
2011: Tomas Tranströmer
2012: Mo Yan, The Garlic Ballads
2013: Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
2014: Patrick Modiano
2015: Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time
2016: Bob Dylan
2017: Kazuo Ishiguro, Nocturnes
2018: Olga Tokarczuk
2019: Peter Handke
2020: Louise Glück, The Wild Iris
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