The Nobel Prize in Literature

Alfred Nobel's Legacy is the World's Most Prestigious Literary Award

Jan 16, 2008

Authors such as Orhan Pamuk, Doris Lessing, Gunter Grass, Ernest Hemingway, Winston Churchill, Pearl Buck, William Butler Yeats, and Boris Pasternak are recognized.

The Nobel Prize in Literature is the most prestigious literary award in the world. The prize was founded and financed by Alfred Nobel, who declared that the prize should go to the living author of “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”. It is awarded on the basis of an exemplary body of work, not for any individual piece of writing.

Alfred Nobel

Alfred Nobel was a Swedish chemist and the inventor of dynamite. He was born in 1833 in Stockholm and raised in St. Petersburg, where his father engineered weapons for the Russian Army. He loved literature but pursued an education in chemical engineering to please his father. He experimented with nitroglycerine in Paris, St. Petersburg, and Stockholm.

By converting nitroglycerine into a paste, Alfred made it safer to work with. He patented his invention, dynamite, and made a fortune producing and exporting it. He spent the rest of his life as an unmarried world-traveling businessman.

Nobel died in 1896 and dedicated his fortune to create a prize promoting peace and cultural and scientific achievements.

History and Controversy

The Nobel Prize in Literature has been given every year since 1901 except for 1914, 1918, 1935, and four years during WWII.

The politics of the prize is controversial. As the New York Times noted, the politics of some recipients have “led commentators to suspect that the Swedish Academy was choosing its winners in part for nonliterary reasons.”

While this statement referred to recent laureates Orhan Pamuk and Harold Pinter, it is nothing new. In its early days, the Swedish Academy notoriously rejected Henrik Ibsen, Emile Zola, and even Leo Tolstoy. Members of the Academy argued that the work and political activities of these authors suggested a world view that did not align with the “ideal direction” that Alfred Nobel stated in his will.

It is possible that the Academy uses the prize to make political statements. For instance, granting the award to writers who were repressed in the USSR like Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1970 and Boris Pasternak in 1958 could be an anti-Soviet statement.

The Academy has been criticized for favoring Western authors, especially prior to Yasunari Kawabata in 1968. This has partly been recompensed in recent decades when non-Western authors like Jose Saramago, Nadine Gordimer, and Wole Soyinka were honored.

Prize Money

For the past seven years, each recipient has been awarded 10,000,000 Swedish kronor (at the time of this article, about $1,550,000 USD). The reward wasn’t always so large. Sully Prudhomme, the first recipient, was awarded 150,782 Swedish kronor (SEK) in 1901.

The prize amount fluctuated throughout the years. It was lowest in 1923, when William Butler Yeats was awarded 114,935 SEK.

Award Ceremony

The Nobel Prize Award Ceremonies are held on December 10th, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death. The literature prize is given in Stockholm.

The Nobel Ceremonies and celebrations last for days. Speeches are given by the prize winners during the week leading up to the ceremony. The Award Ceremony finally takes place at the Stockholm Concert Hall.

Following speeches that describe the laureates’ work, the King of Sweden gives out the prizes. Each recipient is awarded a medal and a diploma at the ceremony and will receive their financial reward later. After the ceremony, a banquet is attended by the new laureates, the Swedish royalty, members of the Swedish parliament, other international guests, and 250 students.

Recent Recipients

The copyright of the article The Nobel Prize in Literature in World Literatures is owned by Elizabeth Nelson. Permission to republish The Nobel Prize in Literature in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Jan 16, 2008 5:23 PM

Elizabeth Nelson :

In my recent article on The Nobel Prize in Literature, I discussed some of the ways that the prize has been politically controversial.

What do you think on this issue? Is the Nobel Prize a political statement? How does this affect the award's prestige? Are authors like Alexander Solzhenitsyn and last year's laureate, Orhan Pamuk, less worthy of literary praise because they may have been chosen for political, as well as literary, reasons?

Jan 18, 2008 8:12 PM

Angie Rayfield :

If the Nobel was given to a blatantly poor author simply because he/she happened to write on the "hot" topic, that would be different, but Solzhenitsyn and Pamuk hardly fall into that category! I think that when it comes right down to it, there's a tinge of politics in almost any prize award - after all, it's not like a competitive sporting event where there's a clear-cut score at the end. Sometimes it's not a matter of just writing a great book - it's also the right book at the right time.