Nobel Prize 2017: List of all the Nobel Prize winners in literature from 2000 to 2016

List of Nobel Prize winners in Literature from 2000 to 2016. (Source: Wikimedia Commons Own work/Stoned59/Notedlife)

The Nobel Prize in Literature, which is considered the world’s most prestigious literature prize, is awarded annually Since 1901 to an author who, in the words of Alfred Nobel, produced “in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.” Till today,  the Nobel Literature prize has been awarded 109 times to 113 Nobel and Fourteen women have won the Nobel Prize in Literature. We have curated a list of all the winners from year 2000 till 2016. How many of these did you know?

*The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016
Popular American singer and poet Bob Dylan was awarded the prize last year. According to the Swedish Academy, the singer won for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.

*The Nobel Prize in Literature 2015
Svetlana Alexievich, an investigative journalist and non-fiction prose writer was awarded for “her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time”.

*The Nobel Prize in Literature 2014
Patrick Modiano is a renowned French novelist. His work has been translated in over 30 languages across France and was awarded for “the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation”.

*The Nobel Prize in Literature 2013
Alice Munro is known to have revolutionized the architecture of short stories. She is a Canadian short story writer and won for being the “master of the contemporary short story”.

*The Nobel Prize in Literature 2012

Mo Yan, which means don’t speak in Chinese, is a pen name of Chinese novelist and story writer Guan Moye. He was awarded the prize for being someone “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary”.

*The Nobel Prize in Literature 2011
Swedish poet, psychologist and translator Tomas Tranströmer is considered one the most important Scandinavian writers since the Second World War. He was awarded “because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality”.

*The Nobel Prize in Literature 2010
Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, or commonly known as Mario Vargas Llosa is a Peruvian writer, politician, journalist, essayist and college professor. Many of his works is influenced by the writer’s perception of Peruvian society and his own experiences. he was awarded for “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat”.

*The Nobel Prize in Literature 2009
Romanian-born German novelist, poet, essayist Herta Müller received the award for being someone “who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed”. She is known for highlighting the effects of terror and violence in her work.

*The Nobel Prize in Literature 2008
French author Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, usually known as J. M. G. Le Clézio is known to have started writing at the age of 7. His first book was about the sea and he achieved success at the age of 23, with Le Procès-Verbal. He was awarded “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization”.

*The Nobel Prize in Literature 2007
Doris Lessing, a British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and famously known for her short stories was awarded and described as “that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny”. She was the eleventh woman and the oldest person ever to receive the award.

*The Nobel Prize in Literature 2006

Turkish novelist, screenwriter and academic Orhan Pamuk is known to have sold over thirteen million books in sixty-three languages. He was described as someone “who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures”.

*The Nobel Prize in Literature 2005
Harold Pinter an English playwright, screenwriter, director and actor, was considered one of the most influential modern British dramatist. He was described as “who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms”.

*The Nobel Prize in Literature 2004
An Austrian playwright and novelist Elfriede Jelinek writer about Austrian literature and her writings are deeply rooted in the tradition. She won for her “for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power”.

*The Nobel Prize in Literature 2003
South African novelist, essayist, linguist and translator John M. Coetzee has a reputation of avoiding ceremonies. He has been awarded for being someone “who in innumerable guises portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider”.

*The Nobel Prize in Literature 2002
Imre Kertész, a Hungarian author, won the award “for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history”.

*The Nobel Prize in Literature 2001
British writer Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul won “for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories”

*The Nobel Prize in Literature 2000
Known Chinese novelist, playwright, and critic Gao Xingjian won “for an æuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity, which has opened new paths for the Chinese novel and drama”.