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60 free Nobel Prize in Literature trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Tolstoy never won it, Sartre tried to refuse it, Pasternak was forced to, and Bob Dylan took weeks to acknowledge it. This quiz covers the Nobel Prize in Literature from Alfred Nobel's 1895 will and the 'idealistic direction' clause through the Swedish Academy's 18 chairs, the February deadline, the five-name shortlist, the 50-year secrecy rule and the medal's Virgilian inscription. The bulk of the questions are about the laureates: Sully Prudhomme in 1901, Kipling the youngest and Lessing the oldest, Lagerlöf, Tagore, Sinclair Lewis and Pearl Buck as firsts, Karlfeldt's posthumous prize, Churchill and Russell, Camus, Beckett, Neruda, Solzhenitsyn, García Márquez, Soyinka, Mahfouz, Morrison, Gao Xingjian and Mo Yan, then the modern run from Munro and Alexievich through Ishiguro, Tokarczuk, Handke, Glück, Gurnah, Ernaux, Fosse, Han Kang and Krasznahorkai. Easy questions suit any reader; the expert tier asks for shared prizes and record nominations. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the prize and the individual laureates, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question. If you like this, try our quizzes on Alfred Nobel and on the Booker Prize.
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Q 01In which month does the Swedish Academy normally announce the literature laureate?
October
Literature is traditionally the last of the prizes presented at the December ceremony.
Q 02Alfred Nobel's will says the literature prize should go to work 'in an ___ direction'.
Idealistic
The Swedish word idealisk has been reinterpreted repeatedly, from 'lofty idealism' to championing human rights.
Q 03Alfred Nobel signed his final will in Paris in which year?
1895
He left 94 per cent of his assets, 31 million kronor, to fund the five prizes.
Q 04Who was the first winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1901?
Sully Prudhomme
The French poet won on his first nomination; Tolstoy never won at all.
Q 05Who is the youngest ever literature laureate, aged 41 in 1907?
Rudyard Kipling
He was also the first English-language recipient.
Q 06Who is the oldest literature laureate, aged 88 when awarded in 2007?
Doris Lessing
Author of The Golden Notebook, she was told the news by reporters on her doorstep.
Q 07Who was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1909?
Selma Lagerlöf
The Swedish author of The Wonderful Adventures of Nils joined the Swedish Academy itself in 1914.
Q 08Who became the first non-European Nobel laureate in any category, winning the literature prize in 1913?
Rabindranath Tagore
His poetry collection Gitanjali was praised as 'profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful'.
Q 09Who was the first author from the United States to win the literature prize, in 1930?
Sinclair Lewis
The author of Main Street and Babbitt was also the first winner from the Americas.
Q 10Who was the first American woman to win the literature prize, in 1938?
Pearl S. Buck
She was honoured for her 'rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China'.
Q 11Which laureate was awarded the prize posthumously, in 1931, after refusing it in 1919?
Erik Axel Karlfeldt
He had declined because he was permanent secretary of the very academy that awards it.
Q 12Which Soviet author was forced by his government to decline the 1958 prize?
Boris Pasternak
Doctor Zhivago had been smuggled to Italy and published there in 1957.
Q 13Which French philosopher refused the 1964 prize so as not to 'become an institution'?
Jean-Paul Sartre
He said he always declined official honours.
Q 21What does the pen name of 2012 laureate Mo Yan mean in Chinese?
Don't speak
He adopted it in 1981 as a PLA soldier and later made it his legal name for convenience at the post office.
Q 22Who was the first Japanese author to win the literature prize, in 1968?
Yasunari Kawabata
His spare, lyrical prose includes Snow Country and Thousand Cranes.
Q 23Which Belarusian journalist won the 2015 prize for her 'polyphonic writings'?
Svetlana Alexievich
She writes in Russian, assembling oral histories of Soviet and post-Soviet life.
Q 14Which British prime minister won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953?
Winston Churchill
His multi-volume histories and speeches earned the honour.
Q 15Which philosopher and mathematician won the 1950 literature prize on his first nomination?
Bertrand Russell
He was cited for writings championing 'humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought'.
Q 16Which singer-songwriter won the 2016 prize 'for having created new poetic expressions' in American song?
Bob Dylan
His Nobel lecture appeared on the prize website in June 2017 and drew accusations of borrowing from SparkNotes.
Q 17Who in 1986 became the first African writer to win the literature prize?
Wole Soyinka
The Nigerian playwright was praised for his 'wide cultural perspective and poetic overtones'.
Q 18Which Egyptian novelist, author of The Cairo Trilogy, won in 1988?
Naguib Mahfouz
His trilogy follows three generations of Cairo families from World War I to the 1952 coup.
Q 19Who in 1993 became the first African-American laureate in literature?
Toni Morrison
She had won the Pulitzer for Beloved in 1988.
Q 20Who in 2000 became the first laureate writing in Chinese?
Gao Xingjian
The émigré novelist and painter later became a French citizen.
Q 24Which Canadian short-story writer won in 2013?
Alice Munro
She was hailed as a master of the contemporary short story.
Q 25Which Italian playwright and actor won the 1997 prize?
Dario Fo
The Academy praised him for emulating the jesters of the Middle Ages.
Q 26Which Colombian author of One Hundred Years of Solitude won in 1982?
Gabriel García Márquez
Known as Gabo, he had already won the Neustadt Prize a decade earlier.
Q 27Which Nagasaki-born British novelist won in 2017?
Kazuo Ishiguro
He moved to Britain at five and won the Booker for The Remains of the Day.
Q 28Why was the 2018 prize not announced until 2019?
A scandal over sexual assault claims and resignations at the Academy
The delayed award was finally announced together with the 2019 prize.
Q 29Which Polish writer received the delayed 2018 prize?
Olga Tokarczuk
She was cited for 'a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries'.
Q 30The 2019 award to which Austrian writer drew protests over his support for Serbian nationalism?
Peter Handke
Austrian authorities even investigated whether he had obtained a Yugoslav passport in the 1990s.