The Nobel Prize and Existentialist Literature

The Nobel Prize in Literature was established through the 1895 will of Swedish industrialist and inventor Alfred Nobel, who left the bulk of his fortune to fund prizes in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace. First awarded in 1901, to French poet Sully Prudhomme, it is administered by the Swedish Academy, an institution of eighteen members founded in 1786. Nobel specified that the literature prize should go to whoever had produced, in the preceding year, "the most outstanding work in an ideal direction" (i en idealisk riktning), a famously ambiguous phrase that has shaped, and periodically embarrassed, the prize's history of interpretation.