Literature laureates

Literature · 1910

Paul Heyse

A master of the German novella who carried Italy's poets into German and, at 80, won the 1910 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Literature · 1927

Henri Bergson

A philosopher of lived time and free will who packed lecture halls, then stood with persecuted Jews rather than accept Vichy's exemption.

Literature · 1958

Boris Pasternak

A poet who stayed in Stalin's Russia, wrote Doctor Zhivago, and was forced by his own government to turn down the Nobel Prize.

Literature · 1966

Nelly Sachs

A Berlin poet who escaped the Nazis in 1940 and, in Swedish exile, wrote poems mourning the Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

Refugee

Literature · 1966

Shmuel Agnon

He wrote modern Hebrew fiction in the language of ancient Jewish texts, preserving a lost Jewish world and winning Hebrew its first Nobel.

Literature · 1976

Saul Bellow

A Chicago immigrant's son whose comic, searching novels put Jewish American lives at the center of American literature.

Literature · 1978

Isaac Bashevis Singer

He kept writing in Yiddish after the Holocaust destroyed its heartland, and carried the lost world of Polish Jews to readers everywhere.

Literature · 1981

Elias Canetti

A Sephardic Jewish refugee from Nazi Vienna who spent decades studying how crowds form and how power rests on the threat of death.

Refugee

Literature · 1987

Joseph Brodsky

A Leningrad poet tried as a 'parasite' and expelled by the Soviet state, who became a Nobel laureate and America's Poet Laureate.

Refugee

Literature · 1991

Nadine Gordimer

A novelist who showed the world how apartheid poisoned ordinary lives, while quietly helping the movement that ended it.

Literature · 2002

Imre Kertész

Deported to Auschwitz at 14, he wrote Fatelessness, a novel showing how ordinary people are swallowed by history.

Literature · 2004

Elfriede Jelinek

An Austrian writer who turned everyday clichés inside out to expose sexism, violence and her country's buried Nazi past.

Literature · 2005

Harold Pinter

A tailor's son from Hackney whose plays showed the menace hidden in everyday talk, and who spoke out against torture and war.

Literature · 2014

Patrick Modiano

A French novelist who used old files, addresses and phone books to give names back to people erased in Nazi-occupied Paris.

Literature · 2016

Bob Dylan

A grandson of Jewish immigrants who fused folk, blues and poetry into songs that movements marched to and critics read as literature.

Literature · 2020

Louise Glück

A poet who turned grief, family pain and ancient myth into spare, plain-spoken poems that speak to readers one at a time.

Literature · 2025

László Krasznahorkai

Hungarian novelist whose long, dark and funny sentences stare into collapse and terror yet insist that art still matters.