The book that won Ernest Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature The book that won Ernest Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature 'It's silly not to hope. It's a sin he thought' Set in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana, Hemingway's magnificent fable is the tale of an old man, a young boy and a giant fish. This story of heroic endeavour won Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature. It stands as a unique and timeless vision of the beauty and grief of man's challenge to the elements. 'The best story Hemingway has written. No page of this beautiful master-work could have been done better or differently' Sunday Times 'The writing is as taut, and at the same time as lithe and cunningly played out, as the line on which the old man plays the fish' Guardian