Jewish Nobel Prize Winners in Literature

Listed below are recipients of the Nobel Prize in literature who were, or are, Jewish (or of half-Jewish descent, as noted).

Paul von Heyse ^#,1 (1910)
Henri Bergson ^# (1927)
Boris Pasternak ^# (1958)
Shmuel Agnon ^# (1966)
Nelly Sachs ^# (1966)
Saul Bellow ^# (1976)
Isaac Bashevis Singer ^# (1978)
Elias Canetti ^# (1981)
Joseph Brodsky ^# (1987)
Nadine Gordimer ^# (1991)
Imre Kertész ² (2002)
Elfriede Jelinek ³ (2004)
Harold Pinter ⁴ (2005)
Patrick Modiano⁵ (2014)
Bob Dylan⁶ (2016)
Louise Glück⁷ (2020)
László Krasznahorkai⁸ (2025)

NOTES
# Encyclopaedia Judaica (1997 CD ROM edition). (This source was listed by the Library Journal as one of its "Top 50 Reference Works of the Millennium.")
1. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father; see first paragraph of autobiography: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1910/heyse-autobio.html.
2. See first paragraph of biography: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2002/kertesz-bio.html.
3. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother. In a 1998 interview, Jelinek stated "Mein Vater war auch Jude"; see fourth question in interview:
http://www.hagalil.com/archiv/98/12/jellinek.htm and first paragraph of bio-bibliographical notes: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2004/bio-bibl.html.
4. See first paragraph of bio-bibliographical notes: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2005/bio-bibl.html. In Conversations with Pinter, by Mel Gussow (Grove, New York, 1996, p.103), Pinter describes his mother and father as "very solid, very respectable, Jewish, lower middle class people."
5. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother. See, e.g., Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century, edited by Sorrel Kerbel (Taylor and Francis, New York and London, 2003, pp. 383-384).
6. Born Robert Zimmerman. See Encyclopaedia Judaica: Second Edition (Thomson Gale/Macmillan Reference, Farmington Hills, MI, 2007, Vol. 6, pp. 78-79).
7.See Encyclopaedia Judaica: Second Edition (Thomson Gale/Macmillan Reference, Farmington Hills, MI, 2007, Vol. 7, p. 643).
8. Jewish father. Krasznahorkai is quoted in an interview with a Greek publication in 2018 as saying: "Well, I am half Jewish, but if things carry on in Hungary as they seem likely to do, I’ll soon be entirely Jewish.” See 9 October 2025 Times of Israel article.