section_path: Laureates/Potential candidates
section_name: Potential candidates
paragraph_text: Potential candidates
  
  Nominations are kept secret for at least 50 years before they are publicly available at The Nomination Database for the Nobel Prize in Literature. As of 2025, only nominations submitted between 1901 and 1973 are available for public viewing.
  
  What about the rumours circling around the world about certain people being nominated for the Nobel Prize this year? – Well, either it's just a rumour, or someone among the invited nominators has leaked information. Since the nominations are kept secret for 50 years, you'll have to wait until then to find out.
  
  Nominated candidates are usually considered by the Nobel committee for years, but it has happened on a number of occasions that an author has been instantly awarded after just one nomination. Apart from the first laureate in 1901, Sully Prudhomme, these include Theodor Mommsen in 1902, Rudolf Eucken in 1908, Paul Heyse in 1910, Rabindranath Tagore in 1913, Sinclair Lewis in 1930, Luigi Pirandello in 1934, Pearl Buck in 1938, William Faulkner in 1950 (the prize for 1949) and Bertrand Russell in 1950.
  
  Former recipients of the Nobel Prize in Literature are allowed to nominate their candidates for the prize and sometimes their proposals have subsequently been awarded the prize. The 1912 laureate Gerhart Hauptmann nominated Verner von Heidenstam (awarded in 1916) and Thomas Mann (awarded in 1929), the 1915 laureate Romain Rolland proposed Ivan Bunin (awarded in 1933), Thomas Mann nominated Hermann Hesse (awarded in 1946) in 1931, the 1951 laureate Pär Lagerkvist was proposed by both André Gide and Roger Martin du Gard, and the 1960 laureate Saint-John Perse was nominated several times by the 1948 laureate T. S. Eliot.