Nobel Literature Prize: Here are the names of the last 10 winners

Ahead of the announcement of this year's laureate on Thursday, here is a list of the 10 most recent winners of the Nobel Literature Prize. And, in the words of the Nobel jury, what made their works special.

2021: Abdulrazak Gurnah (Britain): “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”

2020: Louise Gluck (US): “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”


2019: Peter Handke (Austria): “for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience”

2018: Olga Tokarczuk (Poland): “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life”

2017: Kazuo Ishiguro (Britain): “in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world”

2016: Bob Dylan (US): “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”

2015: Svetlana Alexievich (Belarus): “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time”

2014: Patrick Modiano (France): “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation”

2013: Alice Munro (Canada): “master of the contemporary short story”

2012: Mo Yan (China) “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary”