Search/Destroy Every Nobel Prize Winner For Literature

Gabriela Mistral: first latin american winner.

is on the 5000 peso/5 lucas note in chile:

http://tomchao.com/sa/chile5fx.jpg

must be one of the only nobel laureates to be a school teacher of another

p sure Halldór Laxness is in tartarus reading his own work forever

i have never found the lessing...that i want to read. i've picked up quite a few.

i was such a bellow fanboy when i was young. need to re-read some to see if i still feel the same way.

this comes down to Mahfouz vs. IB Singer for me

i read the first two Canopus in Argos book but couldn't go on. i liked everything about them except actually reading them. i don't think they're exactly what doris got the prize for tho.

ooh or Saramago

lots I don't know on here, none I actively dislike.

xp

im a bit ambivalent on lessing. golden notebook is pretty great. some of the other books - a proto "we need to talk about kevin" i had to read in school being the worst i can think of - not so good.

also lessing basically the opposite of a fun read. good to read on a rainy sunday when you're feeling glum.

a scottish person has never won the nobel prize for literature :'-(

Bob Dylan?

is not a true scotsman

apparently he's eligible for everything

Is Pearl S. Buck still considered a major literary figure?

no, not really

i like kipling just fine but rating him over mann, camus, gide, solzhenitsyn, faulkner is a little hard to figure

i have an old abridgment of mommsen's history of rome but have never really cracked it

kipling isnt in the top 20 on this list for me tbh

I probably should take Kipling out of there but I've been re-considering him at the mo. He isn't in the top 20 of mine (if I were to rank them which I won't as I'm not 21 anymore)

Mann - very boring technocratic prose in laying out of the issues in Magic Mountain. Musil was 10x better than this. I want to read his last novel tho'. Death in Venice is great and I do look for the edition of his diaries.

Solzhenitsyn - same but for Soviets. Shamolov and Platonov wrote better prose (partially because they believed in the USSR and were in conflict with it at the same time)

Camus - The Outsider was a bit lucky but I'm told he was v good looking.

Gide - got zilch from his stuff. Rejected the manuscript for Swann's Way, one of the worst literary judgements EVER.

Faulkner - the one guy I want to re-consider.

the fall > the plague > the outsider

Read all of those. Didn't hate it or anything..

kipling was a friggin' genius. there isn't anyone alive who can do everything he could do. i need more kipling.

who is someone who could write fiction and poetry as well as he could? i can't think of anyone.

i wanna stay in his house. not cheap but it's right up the road!

http://landmarktrustusa.org/properties/rudyard-kiplings-naulakha/

God it's actually incredible how much better the Irish are than all the others

My keep list would be something like this: the only Harry Martinson I've read is an epic sci-fi poem set on a spaceship, and it was great

1907 Rudyard Kipling
1913 Rabindranath Tagore
1920 Knut Hamsun
1923 William Butler Yeats
1928 Sigrid Undset
1929 Thomas Mann
1930 Sinclair Lewis
1933 Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin
1934 Luigi Pirandello
1936 Eugene O'Neill
1947 André Gide
1948 T. S. Eliot
1951 Pär Lagerkvist
1952 François Mauriac
1955 Halldór Laxness
1957 Albert Camus
1961 Ivo Andric
1962 John Steinbeck
1964 Jean-Paul Sartre (declined the prize)
1968 Yasunari Kawabata
1969 Samuel Beckett
1971 Pablo Neruda
1972 Heinrich Böll
1973 Patrick White
1974 Harry Martinson
1978 Isaac Bashevis Singer
1980 Czesław Miłosz
1981 Elias Canetti
1983 William Golding
1986 Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka
1987 Joseph Brodsky
1988 Naguib Mahfouz
1995 Seamus Heaney
1996 Wisława Szymborska
1998 José Saramago
2002 Imre Kertész
2003 John Maxwell Coetzee
2004 Elfriede Jelinek
2005 Harold Pinter
2011 Tomas Tranströmer
2013 Alice Munro
2014 Patrick Modiano
2015 Svetlana Alexievich

Pre-Dylan, Muller and le Clezio seem like the last big mis-steps. Muller can be a good writer, but so utterly humourless, and le Clezio just seems like an overrated sadist.

i need to read more william golding. his post-piggy books always sound really interesting to me, but i always forget to look for them in used shops which is the only place i'd ever find them. plus, he had the best first edition covers ever.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7f/FreeFall.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9c/WillianGolding_TheInheritors.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2f/TheSpire.JPG

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6d/PincherMartin.jpg

Actually Evil:

1953 Sir Winston Churchill
2016 Bob Dylan

I LOLed

Pre-Dylan, Muller and le Clezio seem like the last big mis-steps. Muller can be a good writer, but so utterly humourless, and le Clezio just seems like an overrated sadist.

― I hear from this arsehole again, he's going in the river (James Morrison), 15. oktober 2016 03:28 (eight hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I heard a lot of snickering at Modiano as well, or am I remembering it wrong?

I totally forgot until this second that Coetzee won the Nobel Prize, weird

Anyway, Laxness's "Independent People" is one of the most magnificent things I've ever read, thank you Nobel committee for bringing it to my attention.

Mann - very boring technocratic prose in laying out of the issues in Magic Mountain. Musil was 10x better than this. I want to read his last novel tho'. Death in Venice is great and I do look for the edition of his diarie

You might respond differently to the translator and Joseph and His Brothers, which I finished three weeks ago and wanted another 1500 pages of. The mountains of historical detail reinvented by a self-consciously 20th century narrator provoked the right kind of dialectical thinking.

otoh Thomas Mann exists so that he can win Nobel Prizes.

Kipling's short stories are rather good: terse little things with a good ear for dialect that I'll pick over Hemingway's these days.

who is someone who could write fiction and poetry as well as he could? i can't think of anyone.

― scott seward, Friday, October 14, 2016

Hardy and Lawrence.

1970 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
1972 Heinrich Böll
1973 Patrick White

boy have I given these three a number of chances. Am I reading the right White? What's a good start?

I feel like Kipling and Yeats are the most imperishable here, but I haven't read most of the list. Kawabata is one I want to check out.

otoh Thomas Mann exists so that he can win Nobel Prizes.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 15 October 2016 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

He was born for it! Even now absolutely encapsulates what the Nobel for lit is about and...its not pretty.

I don't know, historical novels ain't my bag. My line on translation is that someone who speaks to me will do so even if I come across a translation that is regarded as bad. So if I'm not liking something its either because its something I am not disposed towards or its bad, or I am but I don't like the writing, or these are things I am not ready for just now (on that one Dostoevsky passed me by at 17 but now I'm good with him)

Historical novels aren't mine either, but I loved the Joseph story as a kid and read Harold Bloom's The Book of J in college.

I'm surprised Milan Kundera didnt get a Nobel Prize

or Joyce!

Saul Bellow is the only writer on the list I'm not keen on

Felix Krull is a hoot

yep

making people listen to Patti Smith is kinda mean, Zim

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AxfGzW7AdY

this prize wasn't as unjustified as people were saying last year

Louise she's all right she's just near
She's delicate and seems like veneer
But she just makes it all too concise and too clear
That Johanna's not here

this is so mean. has to sting anyone who's been a "rebound"

this prize wasn't as unjustified as people were saying last year

It's more unjustified than people were saying last year, because in the interim Ashbery died and now can never win

Probably fairer to say he has won the only nobel prize that counts

An argument for giving Dril the Prize for Literature - though I suspect this would be complicated by the fact that, iirc, multiple people actually run that account.

The point of the Nobel Prize in Literature is — according to its own stated aims — to honor an author from any country who has produced, as the original Swedish puts it: “den som inom litteraturen har producerat det mest framstående verket i en idealisk riktning,” or, as this line is usually translated: “in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.”

In the past, this translation has been fraught with controversy. The Swedish word “idealisk” can apparently be translated either as “ideal” or “idealistic”, but either way, no one is quite sure what it means. In the award’s early years, writers who had dedicated their careers to aesthetic realism (as opposed to idealism) tended to be passed over. Thus the French poet and essayist Sully Prudhomme won the award in the Nobel's first year, 1901, but his countryman Emile Zola, whose work has proved far more enduring, was never honored. More recently, the phrase “ideal direction” has been interpreted to mean something more like the championing of certain liberal, humanitarian ideals, hence why so many laureates seem to be awarded the prize, at least in part, for their political commitments and beliefs — Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn or Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka challenging the authoritarian regimes they lived under; British playwright Harold Pinter taking a vocal stance against the Iraq War.

So does Dril's work move in an “ideal direction”? Upon proper consideration of his work, it would be hard to argue that it doesn't. Dril is a remarkable writer whose work not only helps us understand but helps us to respond to the world in which we are forced to exist.

https://theoutline.com/post/7245/give-the-nobel-prize-to-dril

Thought it was one person.

In any case scientists often share the prize for a single discovery.

Longtime co-authors or collectives should absolutely be eligible for a literature prize. dril is Luther Blissett

I think of wallowing as inertia, getting bogged down, sometimes miserablist complacency---not meant as a comment on her book, which I haven't read. Wallowing can also come across as enjoyment, resting, cooling off in the mud: an early 70s reference to Little Richard currently "wallowing in insane vaudeville" doesn't come across as that bad a thing, especially considering how many other performers didn't make it through those years (maybe wallowing iiv helped?)

that's a nice approach

but if you choose Han Kang as your starting point, maybe you're not going to want to go much further

I'll stop now

― corrs unplugged, 12. oktober 2024 16:07 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Even if this is as bad as you say, I don't think ppl would immediately give up on South Korean books.

People will get to read of characters in a different setting, who think about things in a slightly different way. Even if the result isn't to that reader's liking this stuff could get them to go further.

I think Han Kang already led a bunch of people to read South Korean literature.
― Frederik B, Sunday, October 13, 2024 6:05 PM (yesterday)

Definitely made it easier for translators to get funding / gave a hook for people to promote other South Korean novels/novellas (Bae Suah's Nowhere To Be Found did decently in New Zealand - here's a good interview with the translator, Sora Kim-Russell: https://better-read.com/2019/03/13/found/ )

I discovered my wife bought The Vegetarian ebook some years ago, so I read it. I thought it was very good. Extraordinary energy to the first part, the way everyone treats her as though she has voluntarily and deliberately transformed into a monstrous giant insect. The other two parts very effective at taking you into the mind of a horrible jerk, and showing the experience of dealing with someone with severe mental health issues.

There's something to be said about those later sections that align the book with the Life and Times of Michael K - not so much that she enters a state of grace (one of Coetzee's central themes) but, crudely, how do we get the world to leave us alone?. I need to think it through.

It's a theme in the Banshees of Inisherin as well.

the first part of the vegetarian is one of those rare pieces of writing with that super powerful g-force momentum. very fond memories of reading it

The central character is hollow, the two men are repulsive, it's grotesque, there is little connection between the three parts, and it's not really about vegetarianism. It's wallowing in its dark and gross content, and I didn't see any point, or maybe I didn't care for the social allegory. The first part would have been ok as a stand-alone.

― Nabozo, Saturday, October 12, 2024 1:18 PM (four months ago) bookmarkflaglink

you sound like one of the rabid YA reviewers on Goodreads who excoriates a novel because it doesn’t do exactly what they want it to do.

Finished 'We Do Not Part' this morning. First half was kinda boring, but glad I stuck with it, because the second part is extraordinary. This and 'Human Acts' is absolutely Nobel caliber literature.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/oct/09/laszlo-krasznahorkai-wins-the-nobel-prize-in-literature-2025

On readers discovering his work for the first time, he added: “If there are readers who haven’t read my books, I couldn’t recommend anything to read to them; instead, I’d advise them to go out, sit down somewhere, perhaps by the side of a brook, with nothing to do, nothing to think about, just remaining in silence like stones. They will eventually meet someone who has already read my books.”

And then go see Werckmeister Harmonies. Top three film of all time.

Another Nobel shamelessly stolen from DJT - his mastery of all caps alone made him more than deserving.

This one is a little bit underwhelming to me though I like Lazlo..

I've only seen film adaptations of his novels.

I've enjoyed enough bleak plot free long sentenced novels on the human condition but satantango didn't do it for me.

still waiting for Murnane to win tbh

The prize committee doesn't have the option of not naming any author, so there will always be some underwhelming choices.

1917 Karl Adolph Gjellerup Henrik Pontoppidan

I read this name listed in the OP and wonder if KAGHP's work is still in print in any country or any language and who on the present prize committee could name any of his works.

those are two guys

Lucky Per (by Pontoppidan) is great

and yeah it's in print

https://penguinrandomhousehighereducation.com/book/?isbn=9781101908099

Correction: these names. Apparently Pontoppidan is still read in Danish. otoh, Wikipedia notes of Gjellerup, "Today Gjellerup is almost forgotten in Denmark."

I can see why Gjellerup fell out of favor. His most well known book is about a European going to the Far East and discovering Buddhism.

A Fortunate Man has an NYRB English language edition

The White Bear too

I love the idea of sitting down by the side of a brook and not leaving until you've talked with someone who has read a book by László Krasznahorkai.

Could take years.

To meet someone who has read one or to read one?

Pontoppidan was fully deserving. Everyone should read Lucky Per. And my guess would be everyone on the Nobel committee has read it.

Lucky Per was wonderful!

get ready to learn hungarian buddy

— a*dan f (@henribergson666) October 9, 2025

Szirtes has written a little poem for LK.

FOR LK

In this translation
you will look in vain for a
full-stop, Stops are there,

but hard to find. Keep
searching. Oh look, there is one!
He must have taken

breath. Time can stand still
for the blink of a whale's eye.
Then the whale goes down,

spouting as it dives.

— George Szirtes (@george_szirtes) October 9, 2025

do whales spout as they dive? this seems unlikely

(i have read moby-dick and know everything about the great fish)

I would google this and get an AI hallucination saying yes.

I can see why Gjellerup fell out of favor. His most well known book is about a European going to the Far East and discovering Buddhism.

Eat Pray Love

only foolish whales spout as they dive. wise whales inhale and hold their breath before diving, then spout as they surface.

Sátántangó is an amazing film by Béla Tarr from 1994, based on László Krasznahorkai's first novel from 1985, which was only translated into English in 2012. A dozen of his other novels have been translated into English since then, but so far this is his only novel that is available on audio

Tarr also filmed The Melancholy of Resistance (1989) which is among Krasznahorkai’s best-known works, as Werckmeister Harmonies in 2000, another great film.

Krasznahorkai's themes seem to involve a surreal atmosphere, dense prose, and an exploration of societal collapse

Like with Jon Fosse (who won the Nobel Prize in 2023), his books are filled with endless run-on sentences, but where Fosse delivers a simple stream-of-consciouness sentence that lasts for a whole 7-part novel, Krasznahorkai's writing is filled with complicated clauses and subclauses with no breaks for a chapter. Both novelists are really interesting and their books lend themselves to an audio format