Nobel Literature Prize: How the winner is secretly chosen

On Thursday, October 8, at around 1 p.m. CEST, all eyes in the literary world will be set on Stockholm. 

That's when the new permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Ingrid Carlberg, will hold a press conference to announce the winner of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature, marking the end of a lengthy selection process that officially began a year earlier. 

Nobel Prize in Literature: How nominations work 

The Swedish Academy is the body responsible for awarding the prize. Its 18 members consist of writers, professors and intellectuals.

In September of the previous year, the Academy's Nobel Committee sends forms to hundreds of individuals and organizations eligible to submit nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature. 

According to the Nobel Prize website, these include professors of literature and linguistics at universities and colleges, previous Nobel laureates in literature and the heads of writers' associations that represent the literary community in their respective countries. Anyone from one of these groups who has not received a form may also submit a nomination. 

"The list can reach 200 names per year of nominated authors," explains Gisele Sapiro, research director at France's National Centre for Scientific Research. She studies how the Nobel Prize, as a global institution, influences the international circulation of literature, power dynamics in the literary world and translation markets.

"The committee can also add names itself, such as authors who were nominated in previous years," she says.  

In the spring, the Nobel Committee then selects five names through a multistage process and presents them to the Academy. Over the summer, Academy members read the nominees' works and discuss them. The decision is always announced in early October.

As for the criteria the Academy uses to make its decision — it prefers to keep them to itself.  

The Nobel Prize in Literature's secret files 

The public doesn't learn which nominees missed out until 50 years later — that's how long the Academy waits before releasing the list.

Sometimes decades pass between an author's first nomination and actually receiving the prize. Danish writer Johannes V. Jensen, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1944, waited 40 years. Doris Lessing received the award in 2007 after 35 years, while Thomas Mann, who won in 1929, had to wait 27 years. 

In his will, Alfred Nobel, the founder of the prize, stipulated that it should be awarded to the person who had produced "the most outstanding work in an idealistic direction." That leaves plenty of room for interpretation. 

According to Gisele Sapiro, the Academy's aim is to honor ambitious, influential literature that has, for example, given rise to a new literary movement. "At the same time, the work has to be universal, being able to transcend their own culture," she says. 

Translations can be one indication of this. "I noted in my research, however, that all the laureates since 1990 had been translated into English, French and German," Sapiro explains, "except for Abdulrazak Gurnah [Editorial note: the Tanzanian-British 2021 Nobel laureate], who had not been translated into German before winning. Meaning that I think these three languages are the most important." 

Sapiro says it is also a major advantage if nominees have already won other major literary awards, such as the International Man Booker Prize, the Cervantes Prize or the Büchner Prize. 

Any genre is eligible

Politics can also influence the Swedish Academy's decisions.

On several occasions, the prize has gone to writers who openly opposed the regimes in their home countries, such as Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich in 2015. She is an outspoken critic of Alexander Lukashenko.

Genre, on the other hand, does not matter. In the past, laureates have been honored not only for novels but also for poetry and plays. In 2016, singer-songwriter Bob Dylan received the prize for his song lyrics. 

So far, only 33 of the 122 laureates have come from outside Europe. There is also a clear gender imbalance. Only in the past eight years have men and women alternated as winners, significantly increasing women's share of the total number of laureates — to 14.9%.

This article was originally written in German. 

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