JEWISH NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS IN LITERATURE
(13% of world total, 27% of US total)
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Listed below are recipients of the Nobel Prize in literature who were, or are, Jewish (or of half-Jewish descent, as noted).
  • Paul von Heyse #,1 (1910)
  • Henri Bergson # (1927)
  • Boris Pasternak # (1958)
  • Shmuel Agnon # (1966)
  • Nelly Sachs # (1966)
  • Saul Bellow # (1976)
  • Isaac Bashevis Singer # (1978)
  • Elias Canetti # (1981)
  • Joseph Brodsky # (1987)
  • Nadine Gordimer # (1991)
  • Imre Kertész 2 (2002)
  • Elfriede Jelinek 3 (2004)
  • Harold Pinter 4 (2005)


NOTES

# Encyclopaedia Judaica (1997 CD ROM edition).
1. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father; see http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1910/heyse-autobio.html.

2. See http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2002/kertesz-bio.html.
3. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.  In a 1998 interview, Jelinek stated "
Mein Vater war auch Jude"; see
http://www.hagalil.com/archiv/98/12/jellinek.htm
and http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2004/bio-bibl.html.
4. See http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2005/bio-bibl.html. In Conversations with Pinter, by Mel Gussow (Grove, New York, 1996, p.103), Pinter describes his mother and father as "very solid, very respectable, Jewish, lower middle class people."


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