Il Premio Nobel per la Letteratura è senz’altro uno dei premi più ambiti a livello mondiale per uno scrittore.
- 1901 – Sully Prudhomme
- 1902 – Theodor Mommsen
- 1903 – Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson;
- 1904 – Frédéric Mistral, José Echegaray
- 1905 – Henryk Sienkiewicz
- 1906 – Giosuè Carducci
- 1907 – Rudyard Kipling
- 1908 – Rudolf Eucken
- 1909 – Selma Lagerlöf
- 1910 – Paul Heyse
- 1911 – Maurice Maeterlinck
- 1912 – Gerhart Hauptmann
- 1913 – Rabindranath Tagore
- 1914 – non assegnato
- 1915 – Romain Rolland
- 1916 – Verner von Heidenstam:
- 1917 – Karl Gjellerup, Henrik Pontoppidan
- 1918 – non assegnato
- 1919 – Carl Spitteler
- 1920 – Knut Hamsun
- 1921 – Anatole France
- 1922 – Jacinto Benavente
- 1923 – William Butler Yeats
- 1924 – Wladyslaw Reymont
- 1925 – George Bernard Shaw
- 1926 – Grazia Deledda
- 1927 – Henri Bergson
- 1928 – Sigrid Undset
- 1929 – Thomas Mann
- 1930 – Sinclair Lewis
- 1931 – Erik Axel Karlfeldt
- 1932 – John Galsworthy
- 1933 – Ivan Bunin
- 1934 – Luigi Pirandello
- 1935 – non assegnato
- 1936 – Eugene O’Neill
- 1937 – Roger Martin du Gard
- 1938 – Pearl Buck
- 1939 – Frans Eemil Sillanpää
- 1940 – non assegnato
- 1941 – non assegnato
- 1942 – non assegnato
- 1943 – non assegnato
- 1944 – Johannes V. Jensen
- 1945 – Gabriela Mistral
- 1946 – Hermann Hesse
- 1947 – André Gide
- 1948 – T.S. Eliot
- 1949 – William Faulkner
- 1950 – Bertrand Russell
- 1951 – Pär Lagerkvist
- 1952 – François Mauriac
- 1953 – Winston Churchill
- 1954 – Ernest Hemingway
- 1955 – Halldór Laxness
- 1956 – Juan Ramón Jiménez
- 1957 – Albert Camus
- 1958 – Boris Pasternak (rifiutato)
- 1959 – Salvatore Quasimodo
- 1960 – Saint-John Perse
- 1961 – Ivo Andric
- 1962 – John Steinbeck
- 1963 – Giorgos Seferis
- 1964 – Jean-Paul Sartre (rifiutato)
- 1965 – Mikhail Sholokhov
- 1966 – Shmuel Agnon, Nelly Sachs
- 1967 – Miguel Angel Asturias
- 1968 – Yasunari Kawabata
- 1969 – Samuel Beckett
- 1970 – Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
- 1971 – Pablo Neruda
- 1972 – Heinrich Böll
- 1973 – Patrick White
- 1974 – Eyvind Johnson, Harry Martinson
- 1975 – Eugenio Montale
- 1976 – Saul Bellow
- 1977 – Vicente Aleixandre
- 1978 – Isaac Bashevis Singer
- 1979 – Odysseus Elytis
- 1980 – Czeslaw Milosz
- 1981 – Elias Canetti
- 1982 – Gabriel García Márquez
- 1983 – William Golding
- 1984 – Jaroslav Seifert
- 1985 – Claude Simon
- 1986 – Wole Soyinka
- 1987 – Joseph Brodsky
- 1988 – Naguib Mahfouz
- 1989 – Camilo José Cela
- 1990 – Octavio Paz
- 1991 – Nadine Gordimer
- 1992 – Derek Walcott
- 1993 – Toni Morrison
- 1994 – Kenzaburo Oe
- 1995 – Seamus Heaney
- 1996 – Wislawa Szymborska
- 1997 – Dario Fo
- 1998 – José Saramago
- 1999 – Günter Grass
- 2000 – Gao Xingjian
- 2001 – V. S. Naipaul
- 2002 – Imre Kertész
- 2003 – J. M. Coetzee
- 2004 – Elfriede Jelinek
- 2005 – Harold Pinter
- 2006 – Orhan Pamuk;
- 2007 – Doris Lessing
- 2008 – Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio
- 2009 – Herta Müller
- 2010 – Mario Vargas Llosa
- 2011 – Tomas Tranströmer
- 2012 – Mo Yan
- 2013 – Alice Munro
- 2014 – Patrick Modiano
- 2015 – Svjatlana Aleksievič
- 2016 – Bob Dylan
- 2017 – Kazuo Ishiguro
- 2018 – Non assegnato
Un’amicizia