Eighteen authors were first-time nominees such as Vicente Aleixandre (awarded in 1977), Conrad Aiken, Miodrag Bulatović, Chiang Yee, Albert Cohen, Adolfo Costa du Rels, Eugen Jebeleanu, Yaşar Kemal, Zenta Mauriņa, Henry Miller, John Crowe Ransom, Isaac Bashevis Singer (awarded in 1978), Martin Wickramasinghe and Xu Xu.

[7] The authors Samuel Nathaniel Behrman, Arna Bontemps, Faruk Nafiz Çamlıbel, Noël Coward, John Creasey, Roland Dorgelès, Neil Miller Gunn, Egon Hostovský, Benn Levy, Warren Lewis, Lucy Beatrice Malleson (known as Anthony Gilbert), Nancy Mitford, Elma Napier, Robert C. O'Brien, Jirō Osaragi, Vera Panova, William Plomer, Brigitte Reimann, Sergio Tofano, Margaret Wilson and Nobuko Yoshiya died in 1973 without having been nominated for the prize while the American author Conrad Aiken died before the only chance to be awarded.

[10] At the award ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December,ber 1973, Artur Lundkvist of the Swedish Academy said: Patrick White’s literary art has spread his fame throughout the world and he now ranks as Australia’s foremost representative in his field.

His creative work, performed in solitude and doubtless in the teeth of considerable opposition, in various kinds of adversity, has gradually yielded lasting and progressively more widely acknowledged results, in spite of the doubts he himself may have had concerning the value of his efforts.

The controversial side of Patrick White is connected with the extreme tension of his self-expression, with his assault on the most difficult problems: the very qualities that constitute his indisputable greatness.

Without those qualities he would be unable to bestow the consolation now present in the very midst of his gloom: the conviction that there must be something more worth living for than our onward rushing civilization seems to offer.