Nobel and Booker Winners from India: List and MCQs

Two prizes carry more weight in the general awareness paper than any other literary honour: the Nobel Prize and the Booker Prize. Questions from this topic are almost always of the matching kind, a name against a work, a work against a year, or a prize against its category, so the safest way to prepare is to learn the lists as pairs rather than as stories.

The Nobel Prize and its categories

The Nobel Prize was created by the will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, and was first awarded in 1901. It is given every year in six categories: Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, Peace and Economic Sciences. The sixth of these, the prize in Economic Sciences, was not in Nobel's will; it was instituted by the Sveriges Riksbank, the central bank of Sweden, in 1968 and first awarded in 1969. Five of the prizes are presented at Stockholm in Sweden, while the Peace Prize is decided by a committee of the Norwegian Parliament and presented at Oslo in Norway. The prizes are given away on 10 December every year, the death anniversary of Alfred Nobel.

The Nobel winners connected with India

Read that table with one distinction in mind, because examiners use it. Tagore, Raman, Mother Teresa, Amartya Sen and Kailash Satyarthi were Indian citizens when they were honoured. Hargobind Khorana, S. Chandrasekhar and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan were born in the subcontinent but were citizens of other countries by the time of the award, and V. S. Naipaul was a British writer of Indian descent born in Trinidad. Mother Teresa was born at Skopje and took Indian citizenship in 1948.

The Booker Prize and India

The Booker Prize was founded in 1969 and is given for a single novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland. Five writers of Indian origin have won it. V. S. Naipaul took it in 1971 for In a Free State. Salman Rushdie won in 1981 for Midnight's Children, the novel that later also won the special Booker of Bookers. Arundhati Roy won in 1997 for The God of Small Things, her first novel. Kiran Desai won in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss; her mother Anita Desai had been shortlisted three times without winning. Aravind Adiga won in 2008 for The White Tiger.

A separate award, the International Booker Prize, is given for a book translated into English, and its money is divided equally between the author and the translator. In 2022 it went to Tomb of Sand, the English translation by Daisy Rockwell of Geetanjali Shree's Hindi novel Ret Samadhi. It was the first book written in any Indian language to win the prize, and the questions from it usually ask for the language, the translator or the original title.

How the questions come

The paper rarely asks for an explanation. It asks who was the first Indian to win the Nobel Prize, which is Tagore in 1913; which Indian won it in physics, which is C. V. Raman in 1930; who among Indians has won the Peace Prize, which is Mother Teresa in 1979 and Kailash Satyarthi in 2014; and which novel brought Arundhati Roy or Aravind Adiga the Booker. It also asks the number of Nobel categories, the city of each ceremony and the date of the award. Keep the Nobel Prize for Literature separate from the Booker in your notes, because the two lists are often mixed in the options.