Nobel Prize in Literature

• 1. Introduction

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  The Nobel Prize in Literature carries a mandate written by a dying man in Paris. Alfred Nobel signed his last will at the Swedish-Norwegian Club on the 27th of November 1895, just over a year before his death, and in it he directed that the prize should go to whoever had, in his words, "produced the most outstanding work in an idealistic direction." That phrase, vague enough to mean almost anything, has fueled arguments for well over a century. Who decides what is ideal? Who decides which writer has benefited mankind the most? And why, critics ask, do the judges keep reaching toward the same corner of the world? The answers lie in the machinery Alfred Nobel set in motion, in the room where eighteen Swedish academicians vote behind closed doors, and in a roster of winners and non-winners that reads like a map of literature's contested territories.

• 2. A Will and Its Machinery

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  Nobel bequeathed 94 percent of his total assets to establish the five prizes that bear his name. That sum amounted to 31 million Swedish kronor, equivalent to roughly 198 million US dollars or 176 million euros in 2016 values. The will was so unexpected in scope that the Norwegian Parliament, the Storting, did not formally approve it until the 26th of April 1897, more than a year after Nobel's death. Ragnar Sohlman and Rudolf Lilljequist, the executors of the will, then formed the Nobel Foundation to manage the fortune and organize the prizes. The prize-awarding institutions were designated in quick succession that June: the Karolinska Institutet on the 7th, the Swedish Academy on the 9th, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on the 11th. In 1900, King Oscar II promulgated the newly created statutes of the Nobel Foundation. Those statutes made explicit what Nobel's will had implied: the prize in literature would be determined by "the Academy in Stockholm," meaning the Swedish Academy. The first ceremony took place in 1901, and literature has traditionally been the final award presented at every Nobel Prize ceremony since.

• 3. Selecting a Laureate

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  Every year, the Swedish Academy dispatches nomination requests to a carefully bounded circle of people: Academy members, professors of literature and language, members of literature academies and societies worldwide, former laureates, and the presidents of writers' organizations. Self-nomination is forbidden, a rule that was tested when New Zealand writer John Macmillan Brown submitted a nomination for himself under the pseudonym "Godfrey Sweven." The committee voided it. Between 1901 and 1950, the Academy typically received around 20 to 35 nominations a year. By the later decades, thousands of requests were being sent out annually, and about 220 proposals were being returned by the 1st of February deadline. The Nobel Committee, a working group of four to five Academy members, then narrows those proposals: to around 20 candidates by April, and to a shortlist of five names approved by the full Academy by May. The next four months are devoted to reading. In October, the eighteen life members of the Academy vote, and any candidate who receives more than half the votes is named laureate. One rule is particularly unusual: no writer can win without having appeared on the shortlist at least twice. That requirement means many authors are reviewed, set aside, and reviewed again across multiple years. When a shortlisted candidate writes in a language none of the academicians reads, the committee calls on translators and oath-sworn outside experts to provide samples of that writer's work.

• 4. Records and Curiosities

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  Spanish philologist Ramon Menendez Pidal received 92 nominations in a single year, 1956, the highest tally recorded for any one nominee between 1901 and 1975. In that same 1956 cycle, a total of 158 proposals were submitted, a figure that was matched again in 1972 before being surpassed by the peak year of 1973, when 205 nominations arrived. Stijn Streuvels, nominated at the age of 98 in 1969, holds the record as the oldest person ever put forward during that period. The Pali Text Society was nominated in 1916 and remains the only literary society ever nominated. Among the strangest entries in the nomination database is the 1911 file for August Strindberg: nominated by Academy member Nathan Soderblom, it arrived too late and was withdrawn without being archived, unlike all other late submissions, which were carried forward to the following year. In 1904, two nominations arrived with documented postal problems. Jose Echegaray's letter was delayed by slow mail service, and Rudyard Kipling's was temporarily misplaced. Rather than deferring them, the committee decided to count both for 1904. Nominations remain sealed for at least 50 years; as of the time the source was written, only submissions from 1901 to 1973 were available for public viewing.

• 5. The Medal and the Money

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  Erik Lindberg designed the literature medal. On its face sits a portrait of Alfred Nobel in left profile. The reverse shows a young man sitting under a laurel tree, listening to and writing down the song of the Muse. Circling the image is a Latin inscription drawn from line 663 of book 6 of Virgil's Aeneid: "Inventas vitam iuvat excoluisse per artes," meaning "It is beneficial to have improved human life through discovered arts." Below the figures, the recipient's name is inscribed; the text "ACAD. SUEC." marks the Swedish Academy's role. The medals were struck by the Myntverket, the Swedish royal mint in Eskilstuna, from 1902 to 2010. In 2011, production shifted to the Det Norske Myntverket in Kongsberg, Norway. From 2012 onward, Svenska Medalj in Eskilstuna has produced them. Each laureate also receives a diploma designed specifically for them by the Swedish Academy, handed directly by the King of Sweden. The prize money has fluctuated over the decades. It started at a nominal value of 150,782 kronor in 1901. It fell as low as 121,333 kronor in 1945 before climbing again, reaching its highest SKr-2011 adjusted value of 11,659,016 in 2001. The prize is ranked as the third richest literary award in the world.

• 6. Who Has Won and Who Has Not

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  Between 1901 and 2024, the prize was awarded 116 times to 121 individuals: 103 men and 18 women. The prize has been shared between two people on four occasions, and it was withheld entirely on seven occasions. Laureates have written in 25 languages. Rudyard Kipling, who received the prize in 1907 at age 41, remains the youngest winner. Doris Lessing, honored in 2007 at age 88, is the oldest. The only posthumous award went to Erik Axel Karlfeldt in 1931; Karlfeldt had declined the prize in 1919 while still alive. Boris Pasternak accepted in 1958 and was then, according to the Nobel Foundation, "caused by the authorities of his country" to decline. Jean-Paul Sartre declined in 1964 on principle. The list of writers who never won has drawn pointed comment. In the Wall Street Journal, Joseph Epstein observed that Leo Tolstoy, Henry James, Anton Chekhov, Mark Twain, Henrik Ibsen, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, and Vladimir Nabokov all lived during the prize's active years and never received it. From 1901 to 1912, the committee was led by the conservative Carl David af Wirsen, who rejected Tolstoy, Ibsen, Emile Zola, and Mark Twain in favor of writers who, as the source notes, "mostly are little read today." The only posthumous prize was not the last time the Swedish Academy honored one of its own members: Verner von Heidenstam received the prize in 1916, Karlfeldt posthumously in 1931, Par Lagerkvist in 1951, and Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson in a shared prize in 1974.

• 7. A Shifting Definition of Ideal

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  The word Alfred Nobel used in the original Swedish was "idealisk," which translates simply as "ideal." What that means has been contested and reinterpreted in almost every decade since 1901. In the prize's early years, the committee read it as "a lofty and sound idealism," a conservative framework that valued church, state, and family, and produced prizes for Bjornstjerne Bjornson, Rudyard Kipling, and Paul Heyse. During World War I, the Academy adopted a policy of neutrality, which contributed to a clustering of awards among Scandinavian writers. In the 1920s, the phrase was loosened to mean "wide-hearted humanity," opening the field to Anatole France, George Bernard Shaw, and Thomas Mann. In the 1930s, "the greatest benefit on mankind" was understood as reaching writers accessible to a broad readership, with prizes going to Sinclair Lewis and Pearl Buck. From 1946 onward, a renewed Academy shifted its attention to literary pioneers: Hermann Hesse, Andre Gide, T. S. Eliot, and William Faulkner. Starting in 1986, the Academy moved to honor writers from outside the traditional European canon, awarding Wole Soyinka from Nigeria, Naguib Mahfouz from Egypt, Toni Morrison as the first African-American laureate, and Gao Xingjian as the first laureate to write in Chinese. In recent years, as of the time of the source, the Academy has interpreted "idealism" as championing human rights on a broad scale. A rare exception in that direction came in 2015, when the prize went to Svetlana Alexievich, one of the few non-fiction writers ever recognized.

• 8. Criticism and the Eurocentric Question

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  As of 2021-16 of the 118 recipients were of Scandinavian origin. Sweden alone has received 8 prizes, more than all of Asia combined (7, counting Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk) and more than all of Latin America (also 7, counting Saint Lucian Derek Walcott). In 2009, then-permanent secretary Horace Engdahl declared that Europe remained "the centre of the literary world" and that the United States was "too isolated, too insular." His successor Peter Englund acknowledged the problem directly: "I think that is a problem. We tend to relate more easily to literature written in Europe and in the European tradition." American critics have pointed to the repeated omission of Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, and Cormac McCarthy, and Latin American critics to the overlooking of Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, and Carlos Fuentes. Tim Parks raised a practical objection: it is not obvious how Swedish professors can fairly compare a poet from Indonesia translated into English against a novelist from Cameroon available only in French and another writing in Afrikaans published in German and Dutch. The prize has also been accused of functioning as a political prize, with judges seen as biased against authors whose political views differ from their own. Nominations for Sri Aurobindo and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, both nominated multiple times, were among those the source identifies as having been ignored. The 2018 award cycle became the first in the prize's history to be postponed not for procedural reasons but amid a crisis: following claims of sexual assault, conflict of interest, and multiple resignations, the Swedish Academy announced on the 4th of May 2018 that the 2018 prize would be announced in 2019 alongside the 2019 laureate. The Neustadt International Prize for Literature, often called the American equivalent of the Nobel, has served as a notable predictor: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Czeslaw Milosz, Octavio Paz, and Tomas Transtromer each won the Neustadt before receiving the Nobel.