Nobel Prize in Literature

The Nobel Prize in literature is awarded annually to an author from any country who has, in the words of Alfred Nobel, produced "the most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency". The "work" in this case generally refers to an author's work as a whole, not to any individual work, though individual works are sometimes cited in the awards. The Swedish Academy decides who, if anyone, will receive the prize in any given year.

Notes

• The women who have received the Nobel Prize for Literature are Selma Lagerlöf, Grazia Deledda, Sigrid Undset, Pearl S. Buck, Gabriela Mistral, Nelly Sachs, Nadine Gordimer, Toni Morrison, Wis?awa Szymborska and Elfriede Jelinek.
• Among the authors who are purportedly front-runners to be awarded the Nobel Prize in 2005 are Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth, J.D. Salinger, John Updike, and Bob Dylan. The nomination of Dylan has been met with some controversy, as it is unclear whether the definition of "literature" includes song lyrics. Several collections of Dylan's songs, however, have previously been published in book form as poetry. Other oft-discussed writers eligible for the prize include Adonis, Chinua Achebe, Paul Auster, J.G. Ballard, Hugo Claus, Carlos Fuentes, Don Delillo, Umberto Eco, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Peter Hoeg, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ha Jin, F. Sionil Jose, Ismail Kadare, Milan Kundera, Stanis?aw Lem, Mario Vargas Llosa, David Malouf, Cees Nooteboom, Amos Oz, Cormac McCarthy, Paul Muldoon, Les Murray, Harry Mulisch, Orhan Pamuk, Harold Pinter, Thomas Pynchon, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Ondaatje, Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Muriel Spark, Tomas Tranströmer, Christa Wolf, Avraham B. Yehoshua and Mo Yan.