The 15 Best Nobel Prize in Literature Winners of All Time

Novelists, poets, playwrights and one songwriter the committee still gets asked about. More than a hundred laureates, and the arguments have never settled.

1. 1
   Gabriel García Márquez

   The 1982 laureate whose One Hundred Years of Solitude defined magical realism.
   1000pts
2. 2
   Toni Morrison

   First Black woman to win, in 1993, for novels including Beloved.
   952pts
3. 3
   Wole Soyinka

   The first African laureate, in 1986, playwright and political prisoner.
   768pts
4. 4
   Olga Tokarczuk

   Polish novelist, the 2018 laureate, known for fragmented, restless narratives.
   621pts
5. 5
   Doris Lessing

   Won in 2007 at 87 and heard the news from reporters on her own doorstep.
   548pts
6. 6
   Albert Camus

   Won at 44 in 1957, one of the youngest laureates, for The Stranger and The Plague.
   548pts
7. 7
   Kazuo Ishiguro

   Won in 2017 for novels of memory and restraint, including The Remains of the Day.
   548pts
8. 8
   Winston Churchill

   Won in 1953 for historical and biographical writing plus his oratory — the only prime minister on the list.
   464pts
9. 9
   T. S. Eliot

   The 1948 laureate behind The Waste Land and Four Quartets.
   464pts
10. 10
    Ernest Hemingway

    Won in 1954, a year after Churchill, for a prose style that reshaped the American sentence.
    464pts
11. 11
    Rabindranath Tagore

    The first non-European laureate, in 1913, poet and composer of two national anthems.
    464pts
12. 12
    Pablo Neruda

    Chilean poet who won in 1971 for love poems and political verse alike.
    365pts
13. 13
    William Faulkner

    The 1949 winner who built an entire fictional Mississippi county.
    0pts
14. 14
    George Bernard Shaw

    The 1925 laureate, and the only person with both a Nobel and an Oscar.
    0pts
15. 15
    Bob Dylan

    The most argued-over award in the prize's history, given in 2016 for song lyrics.
    0pts

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