Nobel Prize in Literature

"A friend of mine called me up early in the morning and said Toni you won the Nobel Prize. And I remember holding his phone thinking she must be drunk."

- Toni Morrison

Never mind the Pulitzer or the Newbery or the Hugo; this is the Literature award that everybody has heard of. (Fame is not the same as prestige; the International Booker Prize is seen in some circles as being more prestigious than the Nobel.) It's also the only one of the six Nobel Prizes that we care about at All The Tropes; the other five rarely if ever delve into fiction, and thus don't deal with very many tropes.

The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to deserving writers in all fields (including songwriting) since 1901, with only eight years seeing no awards: 1914, 1918, 1935, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943 and 2018. In a partial balance to that, though, 1904, 1917, 1966, 1974, and 2019 each saw two awards given. The announcement of the 2018 award was delayed until 2019; we shan't go into why.

The Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded for a body of work, not for a single novel, song, or book of poetry.