This year the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Herta Müller, "who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed".
The Nobel Prize in Literature in 2008 awarded Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization".
With the sole exception of two works in Middle Persian (the Karnamak and the Chatranj Namak) all of the early works (pre-1000 CE) on chess were written by Arabic authors. At this point in the origins of chess the rules were those of Shatranj.
One of the most common ways for chess historians to trace when the board game chess entered a country is to look at the literature of that country. Although due to the names associated with chess sometimes being used for more then one game (for instance Xiang-qi in China and Tables in England), the only certain reference to chess is often several hundred years later than uncertain earlier references.
