The 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) "because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West." He is the first and remains only the Indian recipient of the prize. The award stemmed from the idealistic and accessible (for Western readers) nature of a small body of translated material, including the translated Gitanjali.
