In just over a century, the Nobel Prize in Literature has established itself as the most prestigious of literary distinctions. With 14 laureates, France has been in the lead since the prize was founded. Sully-Prudhomme was the first to be awarded this prize in 1901, followed by Frédéric Mistral (1904), Romain Rolland (1915), Anatole France (1921), Roger Martin du Gard (1937). Henri Bergson is one of the few philosophers to have won it, in 1927. André Gide (1947), François Mauriac (1952), Albert Camus (1957), Saint-John Perse (1960), Claude Simon (1985), Gao Xingjian (2000) and Jean-Marie Le Clézio (2008) also took the grandeur of French literature to Stockholm.

Interestingly, Jean-Paul Sartre is also the only writer to have turned down the Nobel Prize that was awarded to him in 1964! Alongside the French Nobel Prize winners, there are also other famous writers: the Englishmen Rudyard Kipling (1907) and Winston Churchill (1953), the Italians Luigi Pirandello (1934) and Dario Fo (1929), the German Thomas Mann (1949) and the Americans William Faulkner (1949), Ernest Hemingway (1954), and John Steinbeck (1962).