Who was the first African writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature?
- A.Naguib Mahfouz
- B.Nadine Gordimer
- C.Wole Soyinka
- D.J. M. Coetzee
Correct answer
Explanation
The correct answer is C, Wole Soyinka. The Nigerian dramatist, poet and novelist won the prize in 1986, the first African laureate in literature, and he is remembered for plays such as Death and the King's Horseman and A Dance of the Forests. Option A, Naguib Mahfouz of Egypt, won in 1988 and is also African, but he came two years later; his distinction is that he was the first laureate writing in Arabic. Option B, Nadine Gordimer of South Africa, won in 1991 for novels of life under apartheid. Option D, J. M. Coetzee, also of South Africa, won in 2003 for Disgrace and Waiting for the Barbarians. The order 1986, 1988, 1991 and 2003 answers every variant of this question, and Soyinka stands first in it.
Read the full article: Nobel Prize in Literature: Laureates and Their Works
Practice Questions
View allFor which collection of poems was Rabindranath Tagore awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913?
- A.Gora
- B.Gitanjali
- C.Chokher Bali
- D.Ghare Baire
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The Swedish Academy cited the profoundly sensitive and beautiful verse of Gitanjali, which Tagore had himself rendered into English as Song Offerings and published in 1912 with an introduction by W. B. Yeats; the prize made him the first Asian and the first non-European laureate in any Nobel category.
Read the full explanation →Who wrote the book 'The Golden Boat'?
- A.Satyajit Ray
- B.Munshi Prem Chand
- C.Rabindranath Tagore
- D.RK Narayan
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The Golden Boat is the English title of Sonar Tari, the Bengali collection of poems Tagore published in 1894, nineteen years before his Nobel Prize, and its title poem is among the best known in modern Bengali verse.
Read the full explanation →Which institution selects the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature?
- A.The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
- B.The Swedish Academy
- C.The Norwegian Nobel Committee
- D.The Karolinska Institute
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Alfred Nobel's will of 1895 named a different body for each prize, and for literature it named the Academy in Stockholm, founded in 1786 to guard the Swedish language, which still announces the laureate each October.
Read the full explanation →Who was the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature?
- A.Selma Lagerlof
- B.Pearl S. Buck
- C.Toni Morrison
- D.Grazia Deledda
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The Swedish writer won the prize in 1909, eight years after the prize was first given, and she was later also the first woman elected to the Swedish Academy itself.
Read the full explanation →Which writer refused the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to him in 1964?
- A.Albert Camus
- B.Boris Pasternak
- C.Jean-Paul Sartre
- D.Samuel Beckett
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The French philosopher and novelist declined the prize of 1964, explaining that a writer must not allow himself to be transformed into an institution and that he had always refused official honours.
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