The Nobel Prize for Literature 2020 is Announced

Over the past few days the Nobel Prizes have been announced. This year things are looking a little different across the board thanks to Covid and there has been no big ceremony. Add that to last year’s controversy for the Nobel organisation, it’s been quite disruptive for the world’s most prestigious award ceremony.

This morning, the Nobel Prize for Literature has been announced and the prestigious prize goes to Louise Glück, an American poet who has won ‘for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal’.

Here’s the announcement:

This announcement makes Glück the 16th woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature since the prize’s inception. Here are the other female authors who paved the way:

Selma Lagerlof, 1909

Grazia Deledda, 1926

Sigrid Undset, 1928

Pearl Buck, 1938

Gabriela Mistral, 1945

Nelly Sachs, 1966

Nadine Gordimer, 1991

Toni Morrison, 1993

Wislawa Szymborska, 1996

Elfriede Jelinek, 2004

Doris Lessing, 2007

Herta Muller, 2009

Alice Munro, 2013

Svetlana Alexievich, 2015

Olga Tokarczuk, 2018

Louise Glück, 2020

Faithful and Virtuous Night