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

Gabriel García Márquez

The 1982 laureate whose One Hundred Years of Solitude defined magical realism.

1000pts

2

Toni Morrison

First Black woman to win, in 1993, for novels including Beloved.

952pts

3

Wole Soyinka

The first African laureate, in 1986, playwright and political prisoner.

768pts

4

Olga Tokarczuk

Polish novelist, the 2018 laureate, known for fragmented, restless narratives.

621pts

5

Doris Lessing

Won in 2007 at 87 and heard the news from reporters on her own doorstep.

548pts

6

Albert Camus

Won at 44 in 1957, one of the youngest laureates, for The Stranger and The Plague.

548pts

7

Kazuo Ishiguro

Won in 2017 for novels of memory and restraint, including The Remains of the Day.

548pts

8

Winston Churchill

Won in 1953 for historical and biographical writing plus his oratory — the only prime minister on the list.

464pts

9

T. S. Eliot

The 1948 laureate behind The Waste Land and Four Quartets.

464pts

10

Ernest Hemingway

Won in 1954, a year after Churchill, for a prose style that reshaped the American sentence.

464pts

11

Rabindranath Tagore

The first non-European laureate, in 1913, poet and composer of two national anthems.

464pts

12

Pablo Neruda

Chilean poet who won in 1971 for love poems and political verse alike.

365pts

13

William Faulkner

The 1949 winner who built an entire fictional Mississippi county.

110pts

14

George Bernard Shaw

The 1925 laureate, and the only person with both a Nobel and an Oscar.

110pts

15

Bob Dylan

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

110pts