The Swedish Academy will announce the recipient of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday.

“The prize will be announced on Thursday, 8 October, 13:00 CEST at the earliest, at the Swedish Academy,” a Nobel Prize statement said.

Literature was the fourth prize Alfred Nobel mentioned in his will. His literary interests, which lasted throughout his life, drove its inclusion as a category.

Mr Nobel’s library reportedly included a rich, broad selection of literature in different languages. During the last years of his life, he tried his hand as an author and began writing fiction.

The most recent winner of the coveted prize is Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai, who received the award in 2025 for his compelling and visionary oeuvre reaffirming the power of art amid apocalyptic terror.

South Korean Han Kang won the prize in 2024 for her intense poetic prose confronting historical traumas and the fragility of human life, while Norwegian author, translator, and playwright Jon Olav Fosse won in 2023.

Since the prize’s inception in 1901, notable African writers, including Wole Soyinka (Nigeria), Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt), Nadine Gordimer (South Africa), J.M. Coetzee (South Africa), Doris Lessing (Zimbabwe), and Abdulrazak Gurnah (Tanzania), have also won it.