From Selma Lagerlöf in 1909 to Han Kang in 2024, the Nobel Prize for Literature has only been awarded to 18 women in its history: poets, writers and narrators have achieved the honor established by Alfred Nobel’s will in 1896 and awarded starting in 1901.
Who are the women who won the Nobel Prize for Literature
These are the women who have been awarded the prestigious award so far:
Selma Lagerlöf (Sweden) in 1909 “for the high idealism, vivid imagination and spiritual perception which characterize his works”.
Grazia Deledda (Italy) in 1926 “for his idealistic inspiration, written with plastic clarity depictions of the life of his native island, with profound understanding of human problems”.
Sigrid Undset (Norway) in 1928 “chiefly for his powerful descriptions of Northern life during the Middle Ages”.
Pearl S. Buck (USA) in 1938 “for his rich and epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for his autobiographical works”.
Gabriela Mistral (Chile) in 1945 “for his lyrics, inspired by strong emotions, which made his name a symbol of the idealistic aspirations of the entire Latin American world”.
Nelly Sachs (Germany/Sweden) in 1966 “for his exceptional lyrical and dramatic writing, which interprets Israel’s destiny with moving endurance.”
Nadine Gordimer (South Africa) in 1991 because “with her magnificent epic writing she has been of considerable benefit to humanity”.
Toni Morrison (USA) in 1993 because “in stories characterized by visionary strength and poetic relevance he gives life to an essential aspect of American reality”.
Wislawa Szymborska (Poland) in 1996 “for the poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality”.
Elfriede Jelinek (Austria) in 2004 “for the melodic flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays, which with extreme linguistic taste reveal the absurdity of social clichés and their power”.
Doris Lessing (United Kingdom) in 2007 because she is “singer of the female experience who with scepticism, passion and visionary power has put a divided civilization under scrutiny”
Herta Müller (Germany) in 2009 because “with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, he paints the panorama of the ousted”.
Alice Munro (Canada) in 2013 because she is “a master of the contemporary short story”.
Svetlana Alexievich (Belarus) in 2015 “for his polyphonic work, a monument to suffering and courage in our time”.
Olga Tokarczuk (Poland) in 2018 (awarded in 2019) “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of borders as a form of life”.
Louise luck (USA) in 2020 “for his unmistakable poetic voice which with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”.
Annie Ernaux (France) in 2022 “for the courage and clinical acuity with which he reveals the roots, distances and collective constraints of personal memory”.
Han Kang (South Korea) in 2024 “for his intense poetic prose that addresses historical trauma and exposes the fragility of human life.”