# 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.

*By YPB Team · Published August 18, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-15-best-nobel-prize-in-literature-winners-of-all-time*

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## Current results (4 votes)

1. **Gabriel García Márquez** — 50% (2 votes · score 1000/1000)
   The 1982 laureate whose One Hundred Years of Solitude defined magical realism.
2. **Toni Morrison** — 25% (1 votes · score 952/1000)
   First Black woman to win, in 1993, for novels including Beloved.
3. **Wole Soyinka** — 25% (1 votes · score 768/1000)
   The first African laureate, in 1986, playwright and political prisoner.
4. **Olga Tokarczuk** — 0% (0 votes · score 621/1000)
   Polish novelist, the 2018 laureate, known for fragmented, restless narratives.
5. **Doris Lessing** — 0% (0 votes · score 548/1000)
   Won in 2007 at 87 and heard the news from reporters on her own doorstep.
6. **Albert Camus** — 0% (0 votes · score 548/1000)
   Won at 44 in 1957, one of the youngest laureates, for The Stranger and The Plague.
7. **Kazuo Ishiguro** — 0% (0 votes · score 548/1000)
   Won in 2017 for novels of memory and restraint, including The Remains of the Day.
8. **Winston Churchill** — 0% (0 votes · score 464/1000)
   Won in 1953 for historical and biographical writing plus his oratory — the only prime minister on the list.
9. **T. S. Eliot** — 0% (0 votes · score 464/1000)
   The 1948 laureate behind The Waste Land and Four Quartets.
10. **Ernest Hemingway** — 0% (0 votes · score 464/1000)
   Won in 1954, a year after Churchill, for a prose style that reshaped the American sentence.
11. **Rabindranath Tagore** — 0% (0 votes · score 464/1000)
   The first non-European laureate, in 1913, poet and composer of two national anthems.
12. **Pablo Neruda** — 0% (0 votes · score 365/1000)
   Chilean poet who won in 1971 for love poems and political verse alike.
13. **William Faulkner** — 0% (0 votes · score 110/1000)
   The 1949 winner who built an entire fictional Mississippi county.
14. **George Bernard Shaw** — 0% (0 votes · score 110/1000)
   The 1925 laureate, and the only person with both a Nobel and an Oscar.
15. **Bob Dylan** — 0% (0 votes · score 110/1000)
   The most argued-over award in the prize's history, given in 2016 for song lyrics.

Tags: books, all-time, awards, writers