1950     Bertrand Russell

1951     Par Fabian Lagerkvist

1952     Francois Mauriac

1953     Sir Winston Churchill

1954     Ernest Hemingway

1955     Halldor Laxness

1956     Juan Ramon Jimenez

1957     Albert Camus

1958     Boris Pasternak (obliged to decline award)

1959     Salvatore Quasimodo

1960     Saint-John Perse

1961     Ivo Andric

1962     John Steinbeck

1963     George Seferis (pseudonym of Giorgos Seferiadis)

1964     Jean-Paul Sartre (declined award)

1965     Michail Sholokhov

1966     Shmuel Yosef Agnon; Nelly Sachs

1967     Miguel Angel Asturias

1968     Kawabata Yasunari

1969     Samuel Beckett

1970     Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

1971     Pablo Neruda

1972     Heinrich Boell

1973     Patrick White

1974     Eyvind Johnson; Harry Martinson

1975     Eugenio Montale

1976     Saul Bellow

1977     Vicente Aleixandre

1978     Isaac Bashevis Singer

1979     Odysseus Elytis (pseudonym of Odysseus Alepoudhelis)

1980     Czeslaw Milosz

1981     Elias Canetti

1982     Gabriel Garcia Marquez

1983     Sir William Golding

1984     Jaroslav Siefert

1985     Claude Simon

1986     Wole Soyinka

1987     Joseph Brodsky

1988     Naguib Mahfouz

1989     Camilo Jose 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     Jose Saramago