Nobel Prize Winners

1

The Old Man and the Sea

Ernest Hemingway

An aging Cuban fisherman struggles alone at sea with a giant marlin for three days, only to have it devoured by sharks on the way back to shore. The novella won the Pulitzer Prize and is widely cited as a factor in Hemingway's Nobel Prize.

1952 United States

2

Beloved

Toni Morrison

Former slave Sethe is haunted — literally — by the ghost of the daughter she killed to spare her from slavery. Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel confronts the psychological and moral trauma of American slavery with extraordinary force.

1987 United States

3

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel García Márquez

Seven generations of the Buendía family in the fictional town of Macondo, Colombia, from its founding through war, plague, and eventual erasure. The novel that defined magical realism and won García Márquez the Nobel Prize.

1967 Colombia

4

Snow Country

Yasunari Kawabata

A wealthy dilettante from Tokyo travels repeatedly to a remote hot-spring resort in the mountains of northwest Japan and falls into a relationship with a geisha. Kawabata's spare, haiku-like prose captures beauty and transience.

1948 Japan

5

Blindness

José Saramago

An unexplained epidemic of "white blindness" strikes a city. The infected are herded into a quarantined asylum where society's structures rapidly collapse. Saramago's Nobel Prize-winning allegory of human vulnerability and moral failure.

1995 Portugal

6

Buddenbrooks

Thomas Mann

The decline of a wealthy merchant family in Lübeck over four generations as bourgeois values give way to artistic temperament and physical decay. Mann's debut novel, written when he was 25, won him the Nobel Prize in 1929.

1901 Germany

7

The Tin Drum

Günter Grass

Oskar Matzerath, who decides at age three to stop growing, narrates the history of Danzig and Germany through the Nazi era from his bed in a psychiatric hospital. The opening novel of Grass's Danzig Trilogy won the Nobel Prize.

1959 Germany

8

Palace Walk

Naguib Mahfouz

The first volume of the Cairo Trilogy follows the al-Jawad family in a Cairo alley during the British occupation of Egypt after World War I, centred on the tyrannical patriarch al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad. One of the greatest works in Arabic literature.

1956 Egypt