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Nobel Prize in Literature

Who has won the Nobel Prize in Literature? The complete list is below: 122 awards from 1901 to 2025, year by year, with each laureate's country of birth and share of the prize.

All Nobel Prize in Literature winners

Records and curiosities

From 1901 to 2025, the Nobel Prize in Literature has had 122 laureates, 18 of them women. The youngest was Rudyard Kipling, who turned 42 in the award year of 1907; the oldest, Doris Lessing, who turned 88 in 2007. From the Portuguese speaking world: José Saramago (1998). The prize was not awarded in 1914, 1918, 1935, 1940 to 1943.

The Literature prize has a taste for refusals: Jean-Paul Sartre said no in 1964, and Boris Pasternak, the 1958 winner for Doctor Zhivago, was pressured by the Soviet Union into declining. In 1998 José Saramago gave the Portuguese language its only Literature Nobel so far.

Data: official nobelprize.org API (CC0), snapshot of 2026-07-09. This site is independent, is not affiliated with the Nobel Foundation, and uses the prize name in a descriptive way only.

Last updated: 2026-07-10 · Methodology and sources