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Reading List · Nobel Prize in LiteratureEvery Woman Who Won the Nobel Prize in Literature
The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded since 1901, and for most of that time women have been a small minority of its laureates. Selma Lagerlöf was the first, in 1909; only five more followed before 1991. Since then the balance has shifted, and recent prizes have often alternated between men and women. The writers here span novels, poetry, short stories, oral history and memoir, written in ten languages.
The list includes every woman awarded the prize up to the 2026 announcement, nineteen in all, ordered chronologically by prize year. For each one there is a short introduction, a paraphrase of the Nobel citation and a suggested first book, with English translators named where relevant.
Nineteen women laureates, and where to start with each
Selma Lagerlöf
1858–1940 · Mårbacka, Värmland, Sweden
Selma Lagerlöf drew on the legends and landscapes of Värmland, the province where she was born and died. Her fiction mixes folk tale, romance and moral struggle, and ranges from a Sicilian novel about a false Christ Child to Jerusalem, inspired by a Swedish colony in the Holy City, and a children’s geography of Sweden told from the back of a goose.
In 1909 she became the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, honoured for the high ideals, vivid imagination and spiritual insight of her writing. In 1914 she also became the first woman elected to the Swedish Academy.
Read Lagerlöf if you want Scandinavian folklore turned into full-blooded novels.
Start with Gösta Berling’s Saga (1891). A defrocked priest joins a band of reckless pensioners at Ekeby manor on a Värmland lake in the 1820s; Paul Norlen’s English translation appeared as The Saga of Gosta Berling in 2009. Or The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (1906). A boy shrunk to the size of a thumb rides a goose across Sweden, picking up the country’s history and geography along the way.
Grazia Deledda
1871–1936 · Nuoro, Sardinia, Italy
Grazia Deledda set most of her fiction in her native Sardinia, among shepherds, small landowners and village outcasts. Love, guilt, sin, fate and death run through her novels, which treat island life with the weight of tragedy. Her novel Cosima was found complete after her death and published in 1937.
She received the Nobel Prize in 1926, the first Italian woman to do so, for writing that pictured life on her island with clarity and treated universal human problems with depth and sympathy. Reeds in the Wind is available in English from Martha King (1999).
Read Deledda if you want Mediterranean village life told as tragedy.
Start with Reeds in the Wind (1913). Three impoverished sisters of a once-proud Sardinian family live on in a crumbling house with their servant Efix, until their dead sister’s son arrives from the mainland. Or The Mother (1920). A novel translated into English as The Mother by Mary G. Steegmann (1923) and again by Martha Witt and Mary Ann Frese Witt (2025).
Sigrid Undset
1882–1949 · Kalundborg, Denmark
Sigrid Undset was born in Denmark and died in Lillehammer, Norway. Her early realist novels, such as Jenny (1911), follow modern women caught between work, art and love. She then turned to the Norwegian Middle Ages, writing long, closely researched novels about faith, marriage, family loyalty and the consequences of choices made young.
The Nobel Prize came in 1928, principally for her powerful portrayals of life in the medieval North. Tiina Nunnally’s Penguin Classics translation of Kristin Lavransdatter (1997–2000) is the edition most readers now use, and Nunnally has also retranslated the Hestviken novels.
Read Undset if you want a long historical saga with a woman at its centre.
Start with Kristin Lavransdatter (1920). A three-volume novel following a landowner’s daughter in 14th-century Norway from childhood, through a defiant marriage to Erlend Nikulausson, to the Black Death. Or Jenny (1911). A young Norwegian painter goes to Rome looking for inspiration and finds instead a series of romantic crises; in English in The Unknown Sigrid Undset (2001).
Pearl S. Buck
1892–1973 · Hillsboro, West Virginia, US
Pearl S. Buck was taken to China by missionary parents as a baby and grew up speaking English and Chinese. Her novels describe Chinese rural life, family and social change, and she wrote widely on women’s rights, racial equality and adoption. In 1949 she founded Welcome House, an adoption agency for mixed-race children of Asian descent.
In 1938 she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, recognised for her rich, epic portrayals of peasant life in China and for her biographies of her parents, The Exile and Fighting Angel (both 1936). The Good Earth had already won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932.
Read Buck if you want a broad family novel set in pre-revolutionary China.
Start with The Good Earth (1931). A poor farmer, Wang Lung, and his wife O-Lan slowly acquire land in early 20th-century Anhui, survive famine in a southern city, and see their family change as they prosper.
Gabriela Mistral
1889–1957 · Vicuña, Chile
Gabriela Mistral was the pen name of Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, a Chilean teacher who became a school director, an adviser on education reform in Mexico and, from 1932, a consul in Europe and the Americas. Her poems deal with love and loss, motherhood, children, nature, faith and Latin American identity.
In 1945 she became the first Latin American writer to receive the Nobel Prize, for lyric poetry driven by strong emotion that had made her name a symbol of the aspirations of Latin America. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Selected Poems (2003) is a good English introduction.
Read Mistral if you want Latin American poetry from before the Boom.
Start with Desolación (1922). Her first book, published in New York, with poems on motherhood, religion, nature and love for children; a selection is translated in Le Guin’s Selected Poems. Or Madwomen (2008). Randall Couch’s English translation of the Locas mujeres poems (University of Chicago Press).
Nelly Sachs
1891–1970 · Berlin, Germany
Nelly Sachs was a Jewish poet from Berlin who escaped Nazi Germany for Sweden in 1940 with her elderly mother, shortly before she was due to be deported. Her postwar poems and the verse play Eli (1950) address persecution, exile and the murder of Europe’s Jews in a compressed, visionary language.
She shared the 1966 Nobel Prize with Shmuel Yosef Agnon, cited for lyrical and dramatic writing that interprets the destiny of Israel with moving strength. Joshua Weiner’s translation of Flight and Metamorphosis appeared from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2022.
Read Sachs if you want poetry written out of exile and the Holocaust.
Start with Flight and Metamorphosis (1959). A collection of poems of exile, flight and refuge, newly translated into English by Joshua Weiner in 2022. Or O the Chimneys (1967). An earlier English selection of her poems, including the verse play Eli.
Nadine Gordimer
1923–2014 · Springs, Transvaal, South Africa
Nadine Gordimer wrote novels and stories about apartheid South Africa, looking at how politics enters private life, love and moral choice. Several of her books were banned by the apartheid government, including Burger’s Daughter, which was banned a month after publication in 1979, though the ban was lifted three months later. The Conservationist shared the Booker Prize in 1974.
She received the Nobel Prize in 1991, the Academy borrowing Alfred Nobel’s own wording to say that her magnificent epic writing had been of very great benefit to humanity. She kept writing about South Africa after apartheid, as in The Pickup (2001).
Read Gordimer if you want fiction about how politics shapes private lives.
Start with Burger’s Daughter (1979). Rosa Burger, daughter of two Communist activists who died in prison, tries to build a life of her own and is drawn back into politics during the 1976 Soweto uprising. Or July’s People (1981). A novel that imagines a violent revolution in South Africa.
Toni Morrison
1931–2019 · Lorain, Ohio, US
Toni Morrison wrote novels about Black American life, from girlhood in 1940s Ohio to the aftermath of slavery. Her books look at memory, family, community, beauty standards and the damage done by racism, in prose that moves between voices and time periods. Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988.
In 1993 she became the first Black woman to receive the Nobel Prize, cited for novels of visionary force and poetic weight that bring an essential part of American reality to life. The Bluest Eye has often been challenged in American schools.
Read Morrison if you want American history told through the people it tried to erase.
Start with Beloved (1987). In Cincinnati in 1873, Sethe, who escaped slavery, lives in a house she believes is haunted by her dead child, until a young woman called Beloved arrives. Or The Bluest Eye (1970). Her first novel: in Lorain, Ohio, in 1941, a Black girl named Pecola Breedlove longs for blue eyes, believing they would make her loved.
All Toni Morrison books →Wisława Szymborska
1923–2012 · Prowent (now Kórnik), Poland
Wisława Szymborska was a Polish poet who died in Kraków in 2012. Her short, conversational poems take small things seriously, from a cat in an empty flat to love at first sight, and use wit and irony to ask large questions about history, chance and being alive.
She received the Nobel Prize in 1996 for poetry whose ironic precision lets history and biology come to light in fragments of human reality. Her collected work is available in English in Map: Collected and Last Poems (2015), translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak.
Read Szymborska if you want poems that are witty, clear and quietly profound.
Start with Map: Collected and Last Poems (2015). The collected English Szymborska, gathering poems from her first books of the 1950s to her final collection, Enough (2012).
All Wisława Szymborska books →Elfriede Jelinek
Born 1946 · Mürzzuschlag, Styria, Austria
Elfriede Jelinek is an Austrian novelist and playwright whose work attacks the violence hidden in everyday life: in families, sexuality, class and Austria’s relationship with its past. Her prose is dense, satirical and deliberately uncomfortable, and her novels include Women as Lovers (1975), Wonderful, Wonderful Times (1980) and Lust (1989).
She received the 2004 Nobel Prize for novels and plays whose musical play of voices and counter-voices exposes, with great linguistic energy, the absurdity and power of society’s clichés. The Piano Teacher was filmed by Michael Haneke in 2001.
Read Jelinek if you can take fiction that is deliberately harsh and confrontational.
Start with The Piano Teacher (1983). Erika Kohut, a repressed piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatory who lives with her controlling mother, enters a destructive relationship with a student; translated by Joachim Neugroschel.
Doris Lessing
1919–2013 · Kermanshah, Persia (now Iran)
Doris Lessing was born to British parents in Persia and grew up on a farm in Southern Rhodesia before moving to London in 1949. Her work covers colonial Africa, communism, women’s lives and inner breakdown, and she also wrote the five-novel science fiction sequence Canopus in Argos (1979–1983).
Awarded the Nobel Prize in 2007, she was described as an epic writer of women’s experience who examined a divided civilisation with scepticism, fire and visionary power. She was the oldest Literature laureate up to that time.
Read Lessing if you want ambitious novels about politics, women and the mind.
Start with The Golden Notebook (1962). Writer Anna Wulf keeps four coloured notebooks for different parts of her life and tries to bring them together in a fifth, interleaved with a short novel called Free Women. Or The Grass Is Singing (1950). Her first novel opens with the killing of a white farmer’s wife in Southern Rhodesia and traces how her marriage and racism led there.
All Doris Lessing books →Herta Müller
Born 1953 · Nițchidorf, Banat, Romania
Herta Müller grew up in the German-speaking minority of Romania’s Banat region and lost her job as a translator in 1979 after refusing to cooperate with the Securitate, the secret police. Her fiction describes life under Ceaușescu’s dictatorship, surveillance, fear and exile, in a highly compressed, image-led prose.
She received the Nobel Prize in 2009 for depicting the world of the dispossessed with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose. Her English translators include Michael Hofmann and Philip Boehm, and The Land of Green Plums won the International Dublin Literary Award in 1998.
Read Müller if you want fiction about living under surveillance and dictatorship.
Start with The Land of Green Plums (1994). A young ethnic German woman and her university friends are watched and interrogated by the Securitate in Ceaușescu’s Romania after a classmate is found dead; translated by Michael Hofmann (1996). Or The Hunger Angel (2009). A 17-year-old from Sibiu spends five years in a Soviet labour camp after the 1945 deportations, drawing on the experiences of the poet Oskar Pastior; translated by Philip Boehm (2012).
Alice Munro
1931–2024 · Wingham, Ontario, Canada
Alice Munro wrote short stories set mostly in small-town Ontario, following ordinary lives across decades and returning to the moments that change them. Her stories move freely through time and often feel as full as novels. Dance of the Happy Shades (1968) won the Governor General’s Award, and she received the Man Booker International Prize in 2009.
She received the 2013 Nobel Prize as a master of the contemporary short story. After her death in 2024, her daughter Andrea Robin Skinner revealed that Munro had stayed with her husband after learning he had sexually abused Skinner, which has led to a reassessment of her legacy.
Read Munro if you want short stories that hold a whole life.
Start with Runaway (2004). Eight stories, three of them following a woman named Juliet across several decades; it won the 2004 Giller Prize and its Juliet stories were the basis for Almodóvar’s film Julieta (2016). Or Dear Life (2012). A collection of stories published the year before her Nobel Prize.
All Alice Munro books →Svetlana Alexievich
Born 1948 · Stanislav (now Ivano-Frankivsk), Ukraine
Svetlana Alexievich is a Belarusian writer who builds books from interviews, editing the testimony of many ordinary people into a chorus of voices with little commentary of her own. Her subjects are the great Soviet catastrophes and their aftermath: the Second World War, the war in Afghanistan, Chernobyl and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
She received the 2015 Nobel Prize for polyphonic writing that serves as a monument to suffering and courage in our time. All her major books are in English, with translators including Bela Shayevich, Andrew Bromfield, and Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
Read Alexievich if you want history told directly by the people who lived it.
Start with Secondhand Time (2013). An oral history of the end of the Soviet Union and the 1990s, told by people living through the move to capitalism; translated by Bela Shayevich (2016). Or The Unwomanly Face of War (1985). An oral history of Soviet women who served in the Second World War; in English from Random House (2017).
All Svetlana Alexievich books →Olga Tokarczuk
Born 1962 · Sulechów, Poland
Olga Tokarczuk is a Polish novelist whose books cross borders between genres, countries and centuries. She has written fragmentary novels about travel and the body, a rural murder mystery, and The Books of Jacob (2014), a long historical novel. Her English translators are Jennifer Croft and Antonia Lloyd-Jones.
Her 2018 prize, announced in 2019 after the Swedish Academy postponed it, recognised a narrative imagination that treats the crossing of boundaries, with encyclopaedic passion, as a form of life. Flights won the Man Booker International Prize in 2018.
Read Tokarczuk if you like novels that break the usual rules of form.
Start with Flights (2007). A novel in 116 fragments narrated by a woman traveller, ranging from the 17th to the 21st century, including Chopin’s sister carrying his heart home to Warsaw; translated by Jennifer Croft (2017). Or Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009). An elderly astrologer in a Silesian village suspects animals are taking revenge as local hunters start to die; translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.
All Olga Tokarczuk books →Louise Glück
1943–2023 · New York City, US
Louise Glück was an American poet whose spare, intense poems deal with family, loss, desire, mortality and the self, often through Greek myth. She published poetry from Firstborn (1968) to Winter Recipes from the Collective (2021), served as US Poet Laureate in 2003–2004 and won the National Book Award for Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014).
She received the 2020 Nobel Prize for an unmistakable poetic voice whose austere beauty makes individual existence universal. Her last book published in her lifetime, Marigold and Rose (2022), is a short work of fiction.
Read Glück if you want short, exact poems about the biggest subjects.
Start with The Wild Iris (1992). A sequence of poems set in a garden, with titles drawn from flowers and from the hours of prayer; it won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1993. Or Averno (2006). Poems built around the myth of Persephone and the underworld, exploring death, the soul and the body.
All Louise Glück books →Annie Ernaux
Born 1940 · Lillebonne, Normandy, France
Annie Ernaux grew up in Yvetot, Normandy, and writes short, plain books drawn from her own life and family, including an illegal abortion she sought as a student in 1963. Because she treats her experience as evidence of class and social change, her work is often called auto-sociobiography. Her translators include Tanya Leslie and Alison L. Strayer.
She received the 2022 Nobel Prize for the courage and clinical sharpness with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective constraints of personal memory. The Years was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2019.
Read Ernaux if you want memoir that reads as social history.
Start with The Years (2008). A collective memoir of France from 1941 to 2006, following one woman’s life alongside the changing society around her; translated by Alison L. Strayer (2017). Or Happening (2000). A student in 1963 tries to arrange an illegal abortion in France; translated by Tanya Leslie.
All Annie Ernaux books →Han Kang
Born 1970 · Gwangju, South Korea
Han Kang is a South Korean novelist whose books deal with violence, grief and the body, in a quiet, precise style. Her novels in English include The Vegetarian, Human Acts, Greek Lessons and We Do Not Part. Deborah Smith translated her early English editions; The Vegetarian won the International Booker Prize in 2016.
In 2024 she became the first Asian woman and the first Korean to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, cited for intense poetic prose that confronts historical trauma and exposes the fragility of human life.
Read Han Kang if you want short, intense fiction about the body and violence.
Start with The Vegetarian (2007). After a disturbing dream, Yeong-hye stops eating meat, and her husband, brother-in-law and sister each tell part of what follows; translated by Deborah Smith (2015). Or The White Book (2016). A book shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2018; translated by Deborah Smith (2017).
All Han Kang books →Anne Carson
Born 1950 · Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist and classicist who mixes ancient Greek literature with modern life. Her books include verse novels, essays, translations of Sappho and performance pieces such as Norma Jeane Baker of Troy (2019). She was the first woman to win the T. S. Eliot Prize and the first poet to win the Griffin Poetry Prize twice.
In 2026 she became the most recent woman to receive the Nobel Prize, cited for a bold and inventive body of work that, in playful conversation with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.
Read Carson if you want poetry that rewrites the classics in new forms.
Start with Autobiography of Red (1998). A verse novel that turns the red winged monster Geryon of Greek myth into a shy modern teenager who falls in love with Herakles. Or Nox (2010). An elegy for her estranged brother, printed as one long folded sheet in a box, built around Catullus’s poem for his own dead brother.
All Anne Carson books →Which Nobel laureate should you read first?
The best starting point depends on what you want from a book.
- For a long historical saga — Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter (1920)
- For American fiction — Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
- For short stories — Alice Munro, Runaway (2004)
- For history in many voices — Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time (2013)
- For a short, unsettling novel — Han Kang, The Vegetarian (2007)
- For memoir as social history — Annie Ernaux, The Years (2008)
Where to go next
Frequently asked questions
How many women have won the Nobel Prize in Literature?
Nineteen as of October 2026. Han Kang was the eighteenth in 2024; the 2025 prize went to László Krasznahorkai, and Anne Carson became the nineteenth in 2026.
Who was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature?
Selma Lagerlöf of Sweden, in 1909. Her best-known books are Gösta Berling’s Saga and The Wonderful Adventures of Nils.
Who is the most recent woman to win?
Anne Carson, the Canadian poet and classicist, received the 2026 prize, announced on 8 October 2026. Before her, Han Kang won in 2024.
Which American women have won the Nobel Prize in Literature?
Three: Pearl S. Buck in 1938, Toni Morrison in 1993 and Louise Glück in 2020. Morrison was the first Black woman to receive the prize.
Which women Nobel laureates are mainly poets?
Gabriela Mistral, Nelly Sachs, Wisława Szymborska and Louise Glück were honoured chiefly for poetry, and Anne Carson’s work centres on poetry alongside essays and translation.
Why was Olga Tokarczuk’s 2018 prize announced in 2019?
The Swedish Academy postponed the 2018 award because of an internal controversy, then announced Tokarczuk as the 2018 laureate in 2019.
Start with the author whose questions interest you most. The book you remember longest may not be the one with the clearest answers, but the one that changes how you see something familiar.
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