The Nobel Prize for Literature 2021 was awarded to UK author Abdulrazak Gurnah
(Picture: Getty)The Nobel Prize in Literature winner is due to be announced this week, with many well-loved authors in the running. The prize has been awarded 114 times to 118 Nobel Prize laureates between 1901 and 2021.
Past winners include Wole Soyinka (1986), Toni Morrison (1993), and Bob Dylan (2016) for creating “new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.
Though, when Bob Dylan won, not everyone was best pleased with the decision, with novelists claiming that the prize had been cheapened. He was the first songwriter and musician to win the prize.
“I’m a Dylan fan, but this is an ill-conceived nostalgia award wrenched from the rancid prostates of senile, gibbering hippies,” said Trainspotting writer Irvine Welsh at the time.
Here’s everything else you need to know…
What does the Nobel Laureate win?
Each winner receives a medal, a diploma, and a monetary award prize. The amount of money awarded depends on the income of the Nobel Foundation that year.
When will the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature be announced?
The winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature is announced on Thursday (October 6 ), around 2pm GMT.
The announcement will come from the Swedish Academy based in Stockholm and will be awarded later this year.
Who are the favourites?
The judges make an effort to avoid dropping hints about the winners before the announcements, but sometimes word gets out. Bookies also offer odds on possible literature Nobel winners.
Among the bookies’ favourites this year are Haruki Murakami, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, and Salman Rushdie.
Other favourites include:
- Michel Houellebecq 15/2
- Ngugi Wa Thiong 10/1
- Stephen King 11/1
- Annie Ernaux 12/1
- Garielle Lutz 12/1
- Pierre Michon 14/1
- Anne Carson 14/1
- Robert Coover 16/1
- Hélène Cixous 16/1
- Jon Fosse 16/1
- Lyudmila Ulitskaya 16/1
- Margaret Atwood 16/1
- Maryse Condé 18/1
- Jamaica Kincaid 18/1
Who was last year’s winner?
The 2021 prize was awarded to Tanzanian-born British novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, who is also the Emeritus Professor of English and Postcolonial Literature at the University of Kent. Gurnah received the award for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”.
He was the first Black writer to win the prize since Toni Morrison in 1993.
Have there been any Nobel Prize Laureate controversies?
Several countries boycotted the 2019 ceremony after the prize was given to Austrian author Peter Handke.
Handke had been criticised for his stance on the wars in former Yugoslavia and on late Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic.
There was also controversy surrounding 2010 winner, Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa.
Llosa was known for publicly holding right-wing views and was even nicknamed the “king of controversies”, as his political opinions often got more attention than his politics.
