7 Nobel Prize in Literature winners who’ve appeared at the Southbank Centre

First presented in 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has now been awarded to 118 different authors, a number of whom we’ve been lucky enough to host here at the Southbank Centre.

Unlike many other literary awards the Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded in recognition of an author’s body of work, rather than for an individual text. And whilst it has been awarded 118 times, it has only been received on 114 occasions. Russian author Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, and French philosopher Jean-Paul Satre each declined the award, as did Swedish poet Erik Axel Karlfeldt in 1918, only to be posthumously awarded the Prize in 1931.

But, among the luminary literary names who have proudly cradled the top prize, here are seven who you may have been lucky enough to see in person here at the Southbank Centre.

Wole Soyinka

won in 1986, appeared at our first London Literature Festival in 2007

Nigerian-born Soyinka is a prolific poet, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, actor and academic. Imprisoned for almost two years in the 1960s for his stance on the Biafran War he went on to become the first Nobel Literature laureate to hail from the African continent. Is it any wonder that the Nobel committee cited him for being a writer ‘who in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence’?

He was born into a Yoruba family, with a mother who was staunchly feminist and an Anglican minister father. His politics and criticism of censorship have landed him in trouble more than once, with the Nigerian government banning one of his books and later accusing him of treason. In his acceptance speech, Soyinka dedicated his 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature win to Nelson Mandela, then entering his third decade of imprisonment in South Africa.

Soyinka is well-known to Southbank Centre audiences, making a number of appearances here including as one of the headline speakers at the very first London Literature Festival in May 2007. Most recently he joined us as part of the 2021 edition of the same festival in a special online conversation with Emma Dabiri in which he discussed his first novel in 48 years, Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth.

Toni Morrison

won in 1993, made her final Southbank Centre appearance in 2009

Ohio-born Toni Morrison is arguably the grande dame of American fiction writers, giving us the devastating post-American Civil War novel Beloved, as well as Depression-era The Bluest Eye and her eleventh and final novel God Help The Child, about an African-American woman in the fashion industry.

Morrison’s novels deal with multiple aspects of African-American experience throughout history, and although her characters often find themselves in difficult circumstances Morrison doesn’t abandon them to lives without redemption. The Nobel committee cited Morrison for being a writer, ‘who in novels characterised by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality’.

Toni Morrison has made various visits to the Southbank Centre, including an appearance at the Fiction International festival in May 1998, where she read from her recently published novel Paradise. She was back again in 2009 discussing Beloved with a packed audience, 25 years on from its publication and Pulitzer Prize win.

Orhan Pamuk

won in 2006, appeared most recently in 2022

Pamuk was born in Istanbul in 1952 growing up in what was initially a large, happy family. This changed over time as, as he himself puts it, ‘our fortunes dwindled and our family dispersed’. Pamuk had an ambition to be a painter, initially enrolled to train as an architect but then switched to a journalism course. He says the only job he has ever had is writing.

Pamuk’s first book appeared in Turkish in 1974 and by the 1980s he was making waves internationally, with his writing as well as his outspoken politics. Some of his famous books include Istanbul, The White Castle and the multi-award-winning My Name is Red. Of his work, the Nobel Committee said that Pamuk ‘in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures’.

In English, Pamuk’s most famous book is probably The Museum of Innocence, published two years after his Nobel Prize win. Set, like so much of his work, in Istanbul it tells of a romance between a wealthy young man and a girl who works in a shop. The book inspired Pamuk to create a real life museum.

The author’s most recent appearance at the Southbank Centre came in September 2022 when he joined us to present his 11th and longest novel, Nights of Plague. Prior to that Pamuk had last visited our buildings in 2017 to discuss The Red-Haired Woman.

Doris Lessing

won in 2007, made her final Southbank Centre appearance in 2008

Suggestions that Doris Lessing was in line to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature had been rumbling for so long that when it actually happened in 2007 it didn’t initially sink in. In this fabulous clip of the moment she found out – doorstepped by reporters as she returned from the supermarket – her initial words were a wonderfully candid ‘Oh Christ!’.

Born in Iran and raised in Zimbabwe, Lessing was a prolific writer who jumped around genres with ease, publishing memoirs, science fiction and even a book about her love of cats, to name just a few. Her most famous books are probably her debut The Grass is Singing, which deals with the brutal reality of white colonialism in Africa, and The Golden Notebook, an expansive novel about writing, parenthood, middle-age and more.

When she appeared in front of a packed Queen Elizabeth Hall audience in January 2008 it was to discuss her book Alfred and Emily, a biography of her parents – but written as if the First World War had never taken place and her parents had not met.

But it’s her status as an ‘epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny’, as the Nobel committee stated, that have made this spiky author so valued by readers.

Svetlana Alexievich

won in 2015, appeared at Southbank Centre in 2016

Born in Ukraine in 1948, Alexievich grew up in Belarus. Her literary career almost stalled before it started, with the Soviet Communist Party ordering the destruction of her 1983 manuscript The Unwomanly Face of War. But with the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev and perestroika everything changed. Just two years later the text was published to great acclaim and huge sales, along with her second book The Last Witnesses: 100 Unchildlike Stories.

Throughout her long career Alexievich has remained unafraid to criticise the establishment and is famous for giving a voice to hundreds of ordinary people, covering subjects such as the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the Soviets’ ill-fated invasion of Afghanistan and the end of the USSR.

Alexievich told journalists that she was at home doing the ironing when she got the call about her Nobel Prize win. She was cited by the Nobel Committee for her ‘polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time’.

We were lucky enough to welcome Alexievich here on Sunday 29 May 2016, when she joined us as part of the Power of Power festival, to talk about Vladimir Putin.

Kazuo Ishiguro

won in 2017, appeared at the Southbank Centre most recently in 2024

One of the most celebrated contemporary fiction authors, all bar two of Kazuo Ishguro’s novels and short story collections have been short-listed for major awards. And even one of those exceptions, his 1982 debut A Pale View of Hills, won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize. The author’s most famous work is undoubtedly The Remains of the Day, which won the 1989 Booker Prize, and was subsequently adapted as a film which was nominated for eight Academy Awards.

Born in Japan, Ishiguro moved with his family to England at the age of four, and has credited his growing up in the UK to a Japanese family as being crucial to his writing, enabling him to see things from a different perspective from that of many of his English peers. Ishiguro was cited by the Nobel Committee as a writer ‘who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world’.

Southbank Centre audiences have been lucky enough to have had plenty of opportunities to hear from Kazuo Ishiguro over the years as the author has made several appearances on our stages. Perhaps most notable was his 2018 appearance as part of the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Booker Prize, for which he joined fellow Booker Prize winner Michael Ondaatje in conversation. More recently he appeared with us in a special online event in 2021, joining his daughter, and fellow writer, Naomi Ishiguro to discuss their works, and joined us once again in 2024, when he made a surprising admission about the origin of his book titles.

Olga Tokarczuk

won in 2018, appeared at the Southbank Centre in the same year

Writer and activist Olga Tokarczuk published her first collection of poetry in 1989, going on to publish her debut novel, Podróż Ludzi Księgi (The Journey of the Book-People), four years later. A highly acclaimed writer in Poland, the publication of Tokarczuk’s works in English in the 21st century have seen her go on to achieve international success, with her novels Flights and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, each shortlisted for the International Booker Prize; the former winning the award in 2018.

Tokarczuk was born in western Poland, the daughter of two teachers, and it was through her father’s running of the school library that she first found her love of literature. A graduate of clinical psychology Tokarczuk worked as a psychotherapist for several years before leaving this work in 1989, partly to dedicate herself full-time to writing and partly, as she put it, because she felt more neurotic than her clients. On awarding Tokarczuk the Prize in Literature, the Nobel Committee praised the author for ‘a narrative imagination that with encyclopaedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life’.

Olga Tokaczurk first appeared at the Southbank Centre in what was a busy 2018 for her, sandwiching an appearance at our London Literature Festival between her Booker International Prize triumph, and her award of the Nobel Prize. The author joined Antonia Lloyd-Jones in our Purcell Room to discuss that Booker Prize triumph, and her most recent novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.