The Swedish Academy in Stockholm awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to Selma Lagerlöf. She became the first woman and the first Swedish writer to receive the literature prize. Her fiction drew strongly upon the legends, landscapes and oral traditions of Värmland, Sweden.

Lagerlöf's award challenged the overwhelmingly male institutional canon of European literature. Her success helped widen recognition of women's writing and affirmed the literary value of folklore, regional speech and imaginative storytelling.