Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
Nadine Gordimer was a South African writer and political activist. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, recognized as a writer "who through her magnificent epic writing has ... been of very great benefit to humanity".
John Maxwell Coetzee FRSL OMG is a South African and Australian novelist, essayist, linguist, translator and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is one of the most critically acclaimed and decorated authors in the English language. He has won the Booker Prize (twice), the CNA Literary Award (thrice), the Jerusalem Prize, the Prix Femina étranger, and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and holds a number of other awards and honorary doctorates.
Elizabeth Costello is a 2003 novel by South African-born Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee.
The Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society is a biennial literary award given to writers whose works have dealt with themes of human freedom in society.
Olga Nawoja Tokarczuk is a Polish writer, activist, and public intellectual. She is one of the most critically acclaimed and successful authors of her generation in Poland. In 2019, she was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Polish female prose writer for "a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life". For her novel Flights, Tokarczuk was awarded the 2018 Man Booker International Prize. Her works include Primeval and Other Times, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, and The Books of Jacob.
Abdulrazak Gurnah is a Tanzanian-born British novelist and academic. He was born in the Sultanate of Zanzibar and moved to the United Kingdom in the 1960s as a refugee during the Zanzibar Revolution. His novels include Paradise (1994), which was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Whitbread Prize; By the Sea (2001), which was longlisted for the Booker and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Desertion (2005), shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.
The Before Columbus Foundation is a nonprofit organization founded in 1976 by Ishmael Reed, "dedicated to the promotion and dissemination of contemporary American multicultural literature". The Foundation makes annual awards for books published in the US during the previous year that make contributions to American multicultural literature.
Sarah Ladipo Manyika FRSL is a British-Nigerian writer of novels, short stories and essays and an active member of the literary community, particularly supporting and amplifying young writers and female voices. She is the author of two well-received novels, In Dependence (2009) and Like A Mule Bringing Ice Cream To The Sun (2016), as well as the non-fiction collection Between Starshine and Clay: Conversations from the African Diaspora (2022), and her writing has appeared in publications including Granta, Transition, Guernica, and OZY, and previously served as founding Books Editor of OZY. Manyika's work also features in the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa.
The Nobel Prize in Literature is a Swedish literature prize that is awarded annually, since 1901, to an author from any country who has, in the words of the will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, "in the field of literature, produced the most outstanding work in an idealistic direction". Though individual works are sometimes cited as being particularly noteworthy, the award is based on an author's body of work as a whole. The Swedish Academy decides who, if anyone, will receive the prize. The academy announces the name of the laureate in early October. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel in 1895. Literature is traditionally the final award presented at the Nobel Prize ceremony. On some occasions, the award has been postponed to the following year, most recently in 2018 as of July 2023.
Summertime is a 2009 novel by South African-born Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee. It is the third in a series of fictionalized memoirs by Coetzee and details the life of one John Coetzee from the perspective of five people who have known him. The novel largely takes place in the mid to late 1970s, largely in Cape Town, although there are also important scenes in more remote South African settings. While there are obvious similarities between the actual writer of the novel, J. M. Coetzee, and the subject of the novel, John Coetzee, there are some differences - most notably that the John Coetzee of the novel is reported as having died. Within the novel, the opinions and thoughts of the five people are compiled and interpreted by a fictitious biographer, who also adds fragments from John Coetzee's notebooks. It was shortlisted for the 2009 Booker Prize. Coetzee was already a two-time winner of the award and it is for this reason that literary commentator Merritt Moseley believes he did not win it for Summertime.
A. J. Verdelle, is an American novelist who is published by Algonquin Books and Harper, with essays published by Crown, the Smithsonian, the Whitney Museum, Random House, and University of Georgia Press. Verdelle has forthcoming novels from Random House imprint Spiegel & Grau.
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is a 1992 work of literary criticism by Toni Morrison. In it she develops a reading of major white American authors and traces the way their perceptions of blackness gave defining shape to their works, and thus to the American literary canon.
La Vinia Delois Jennings is an American literary scholar and critic of twentieth-century American literature and culture, currently a Distinguished Humanities Professor at the University of Tennessee, and also formerly a Lindsay Young Professor and a 1998 Fulbright Senior Lecturer appointed to the University of Málaga in Spain.
The 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition". The prize was announced by the Swedish Academy on 13 October 2016. He is the 12th Nobel laureate from the United States.
The 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat." The prize was announced by the Swedish Academy on 7 October 2010. He is the first Nobel laureate in Literature from Peru and the fifth Latin American to become one after 1982 Colombian laureate Gabriel García Márquez and 1971 Chilean laureate Pablo Neruda.
The 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk "for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life." The prize was announced the following year by the Swedish Academy on 10 October 2019. Tokarczuk is the sixth Nobel laureate in Literature from Poland after the poet Wisława Szymborska in 1996, and Czesław Miłosz in 1980.
The 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the American poet Louise Glück (1943–2023) who the Swedish Academy members praised "for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal." The winner was announced on October 8, 2020, by Mats Malm, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy. She is the 13th Nobel laureate in Literature from the United States after 2016 laureate Bob Dylan and 1993 laureate Toni Morrison.
The 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Tanzanian-born British novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah who the Swedish Academy members praised "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents." The winner was announced on October 7, 2021, by Mats Malm, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy.
The 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the African-American novelist Toni Morrison (1931–2019) "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality." Morrison was awarded before the third novel of the Beloved Trilogy was published. She became the first black woman of any nationality and the second American woman to win the prize since Pearl S. Buck in 1938. She is also the 8th woman to receive the prize.
