The Nobel Prize for Literature is granted not for a single book, but for an author’s entire body of work, and hence usually goes to a well-established writer. Here are the most recent winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature along with the Nobel Foundation's description of the writer.
1. 2011 - Tomas Transtromer
Swedish poet, "because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality."2. 2010 - Mario Vargas Llosa
Peruvian writer, "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat."
3. 2009 - Herta Müller
Romanian writer, "who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed."
4. 2008 - Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio
French writer, "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization"5. 2007 - Doris Lessing
English writer, "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny."6. 2006 - Orhan Pamuk
Turkish novelist "who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures."7. 2005 - Harold Pinter
British playwright "who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms."8. 2004 - Elfriede Jelinek
Austrian novelist and playwright. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power."9. 2003 - John Maxwell Coetzee
South-African novelist. Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature for being one "who in innumerable guises portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider."10. 2002 - Imre Kertész
Hungarian novelist and essayist. Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature "for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history."
