Which Yiddish-language writer won the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature?

Isaac Bashevis Singer was the Yiddish-language writer who won the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Singer was born in 1903 in Leoncin, then part of the Russian Empire, and grew up in a Polish-Jewish cultural world. He wrote novels, short stories, memoirs, and children’s books in Yiddish, drawing on Jewish folklore, religious traditions, family tensions, migration, and the pressures of modernity.

The Nobel committee praised his narrative art for bringing universal human conditions to life through Polish-Jewish experience. His major works include Satan in Goray, The Family Moskat, The Magician of Lublin, and Enemies, A Love Story. Singer later worked closely with translators and helped make his fiction accessible to a large English-speaking audience.

A frequent mistake is assuming that the Nobel went to Sholem Aleichem, I. L. Peretz, or Chaim Grade, all important Yiddish writers. Singer was the laureate, and his 1978 Nobel lecture explicitly defended Yiddish as a living literary language.