Read Around the World with Nobel Prize for Literature Laureates

March is National Reading Month. March 21 is World Poetry Day (it's also a very special girl's birthday--our youngest daughter Emma Grace). Why not explore poetry and literature with lessons plans from the creme de la creme--the Nobel Prize laureates? Here are lesson plans for reading "around the world" with Nobel Prize for Literature Laureates. In middle school and especially in high school, use these lessons for literature, social studies, history, world religions and cultures classes. My one objection is that multicultural as the prizes are, there have only been 12 women literature laureates in the 112-year history of the Nobel Prize. Those are odds we ladies need to even. Here are famous women laureates and poets: Nellie Sachs, Emily Dickinson, Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emma Lazarus to name a few.

Since President Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, Americans have become focused on the Nobel prizes. Here are lesson plans for reading 'around the world' with Nobel Prize for Literature Laureates. In middle school and especially in high school, use these lessons for world literature, history, world religions and world cultures classes.

I've made a list of some former winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. I have included Nobel Prize winners from around the world of all cultures. I recommend that students be assigned to choose a Nobel Prize winning author and read one or more of her works. If each students selects a different author, you can theoretically read your way around the globe as a class. Keep a large wall map with small Sticky Note arrows to point out the different places that the various Nobel Prize authors were born, lived and worked. I've arranged these authors in order from the present back to the inception of the Nobel Prize in 1903. As far as possible, I've tried to list volumes or works of literature for which these authors are best known.

2006:Turkey, Orhan Pamuk "The Black Book"
2004:Austria, Elfriede Jelnik "Lust"
2001:Trinidad, Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul; "A House for Mr. Biswas"
  2000:China - Gao Xingjian

; Soul Mountain

  1998:Portugal -Jose Saramago; Balthasar and Blimunda


  1997: Italy - Dario Fo; The Pope and the Witch


  1995: Ireland - Seamus Heaney; Bog Poems
 

  1990:
Mexico - Octavio Paz; The Other Mexico

  1989: Spain - Camilo Jose Cela, The Family of Pascual Duarte


  1988: Egypt - Naguib Maufauz; Sugar Street


  1986: Nigeria - Wole Soyinka, The Lion and the Jewel


  1984: Jaroslav Siefert - Czechoslavakia: A Wreath of Poems


  1982:Colombia - Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Leaf Storm and Other Stories


  1979:Greece - Odysseus Elytis; The Sovereign Sun: Selected Poems


  1971:Chile - Pablo Neruda; Twenty Poems


  1968: Japan - YasunarI Kawabata; House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories


  1967: Guatemala - Miguel Angel Asturias; The Bejewelled Boy


  1965: USSR (Russia and now sovereign states) - Mikhail Sholokov; Tales from the Don


  1961:Yugoslavia - Ivo Andric; The Woman from Sarajevo


  1957: France - Albert Camus; The Stranger


  1955: Iceland - Halldor Laxness; Salka Valka


  1944:Denmark - Johannes Jensen; Myths


  1939: Finland - Hans Emil Silanpaa; The Maid Silja


  1951: Sweden - Par Fabian Lagerkvist ; The Dwarf


  1913: India - Rabindranath Tagore; Red Oleanders


  1911:Belgium - Maurice Maeterlinck; The Life of the Bee
Use these lessons in your world literature class.