Seven Underappreciated Nobel Winners

With the latest iteration of the Nobel Prize for Literature recently awarded to cult Hungarian novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai, we thought it’d be a good time to pick out a few underappreciated works from Nobel winning authors. Despite the prestige of the prize, there are a number of works that often fail to achieve the kind of commercial or global acclaim that they, according to the committee at least, deserve. So we went back over the last few decades to select some works that we hope still stand the test of time. 

Doris Lessing – The Grass Is Singing, 1950

Set in South Africa under white rule, Doris Lessing's first novel is both a riveting chronicle of human disintegration and a beautifully understated social critique. Following Mary Turner, the wife of a white farmer in South Africa, the collective psychological portrait that Lessing paints with unfaltering resolve is a blunt criticism of the system of racial segregation that proved equally destructive for both the perpetrators and the tyrannized. A bleak book that explores racial and gender identity, it already foreshadowed the brilliant work that Lessing would continue to produce for the best part of a century. 

Elias Canetti – Crowds and Power, 1960

A German-language giant of the literary arts who was born in Bulgaria, Canetti was a novelist, memoirist and playwright, but arguably one of his greatest works was this non-fiction study called Crowds and Power. The book is stylistically experimental – written with the urgency of a novel, it’s an investigation into psychology, history, sociology, anthropology, cultural history and much more. What it hones in on is a long thought process about mass-driven cruelty, political influence and the movements that dominated the 20th century and its ideologies.

Patrick Modiano – Missing Person, 1978

Much of Modiano’s work is focused on memory – Missing Person is about Guy Roland, a private detective in Paris who is trying to solve the mystery of his own past. His memories erased by amnesia, he has no idea where he is from, or even his real name. As he searches for clues through the city's shadowy streets and smoky bars, latching on to strangers, accumulating mementoes, photographs, scraps and stories, he starts to piece together the events that brought him here, leading back to the murky days of war time.

Gao Xingjian – Soul Mountain, 1990

A Chinese emigre to France with a colourful life story, Xingjian is one of the forgotten giants of modern literature. Soul Mountain, arguably his most vital work, is loosely based on the author's own journey into rural China, inspired by a false diagnosis of lung cancer. The novel is a part autobiographical, part fictional account of a man's journey to find the fabled mountain Lingshan. It is a combination of story fragments, travel accounts, unnamed characters, folk poetry and legends.

Herta Muller – The Appointment, 1997

Herta Müller won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009. Her family was a member of Romania’s German community and her work pitilessly renders the terrors of a crushing regime. Bone-spare and intense, The Appointment is the story of a young seamstress in a clothing factory who is summoned by the government for sewing notes into the linings of coats that are exported to Italy, and a novel that captures a certain Eastern European era with piercing accuracy.

Laszlo Krasznahorkai – Herscht 07769, 2021

The most recent Nobel winner is famed for his commitment to his style and a stark apocalyptic vision. Herscht 07769 is an entire novel written in one cascading sentence, as the narrator’s message to Angela Merkel that has been described as ‘a tour de force, a morality play, a blistering satire, a hilarious and devastating encapsulation of our helplessness at the moral and environmental dilemmas’ of this era. Focused on present-day Germany, it’s also an examination of the way re-emerging nationalistic attitudes can fuel divisiveness.

Check out some of these titles and explore more on the Hammock Literary Map : our interactive, searchable database of award-winning authors from the last two centuries that includes all of the Nobel winners and many others.