Different organisations are responsible for awarding the individual prizes; the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awards the Prizes in Physics, Chemistry, and Economics; the Swedish Academy awards the Prize in Literature; the Karolinska Institute awards the Prize in Physiology or Medicine; and the Norwegian Nobel Committee awards the Prize in Peace.[3] Each recipient receives a medal, a diploma and a monetary award that has varied throughout the years.[2] In 1901, the recipients of the first Nobel Prizes were given 150,782 SEK, equivalent to 10.8 million SEK in 2023. In 2017, the laureates were awarded a prize amount of 9 million SEK.[4] The awards are presented in Stockholm in an annual ceremony on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death.[5]
In years in which the Nobel Prize is not awarded due to external events or a lack of nominations, the prize money is returned to the funds delegated to the relevant prize.[6] The Nobel Prize was not awarded between 1940 and 1942 due to the outbreak of World War II.[7]
Laureates
Between 1901 and 2017, the Nobel Prizes and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences were awarded 585 times to 923 people and organizations. With some receiving the Nobel Prize more than once, this makes a total of 892 individuals (including 844 men, 48 women) and 24 organizations.[8] Six Nobel laureates were not permitted by their governments to accept the Nobel Prize. Adolf Hitler forbade four Germans, Richard Kuhn (Chemistry, 1938), Adolf Butenandt (Chemistry, 1939), Gerhard Domagk (Physiology or Medicine, 1939) and Carl von Ossietzky (Peace, 1936) from accepting their Nobel Prizes. The Chinese government forbade Liu Xiaobo from accepting his Nobel Prize (Peace, 2010)[9] and the government of the Soviet Union pressured Boris Pasternak (Literature, 1958) to decline his award. Liu Xiaobo, Carl von Ossietzky and Aung San Suu Kyi were all awarded their Nobel Prize while in prison or detention.[10] Two Nobel laureates, Jean-Paul Sartre (Literature, 1964) and Lê Ðức Thọ (Peace, 1973), declined the award; Sartre declined the award as he declined all official honors, and Thọ declined the award due to the situation Vietnam was in at the time.
The Committee neither informs the media nor the candidates themselves of the names of the nominees. Insofar as specific names frequently appear in the early predictions of who will receive the award in any given year, this is either pure speculation or inside information from the person or people who submitted the nomination. After fifty years, the database of nominations maintained by the Nobel Committee is made available to the public.[17] Statutes of the Nobel Foundation, § 10, states:
A prize-awarding body may, however, after due consideration in each individual case, permit access to material which formed the basis for the evaluation and decision concerning a prize, for purposes of research in intellectual history. Such permission may not, however, be granted until at least 50 years have elapsed after the date on which the decision in question was made.[18]
^ abc In 1938 and 1939, the government of Germany did not allow three German Nobel nominees to accept their Nobel Prizes. The three were Richard Kuhn, Nobel laureate in Chemistry in 1938; Adolf Butenandt, Nobel laureate in Chemistry in 1939; and Gerhard Domagk, Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine in 1939. They were later awarded the Nobel Prize diploma and medal, but not the money.[11]
^
In 1948, the Nobel Prize in Peace was not awarded. The Nobel Foundation's website suggests that it would have been awarded to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. However, due to his assassination earlier that year, it was left unassigned in his honor.[14]
^In 1958, Russian-born Boris Pasternak, under pressure from the government of the Soviet Union, was forced to decline the Nobel Prize in Literature.[11]
^In 1964, Jean-Paul Sartre refused to accept the Nobel Prize in Literature, as he had consistently refused all official honors in the past.[11]
^In 1973, Lê Đức Thọ declined the Nobel Peace Prize. His reason was that he felt he did not deserve it because although he helped negotiate the Paris Peace Accords (a cease-fire in the Vietnam War), there had been no actual peace agreement.[7][11]
^In 2010, Liu Xiaobo was unable to receive the Nobel Peace Prize as he was sentenced to 11 years of imprisonment by the Chinese authorities.[15]
^The 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded in 2019, as scandals within the Swedish Academy forced it to postpone the ceremony.[16]
^Tønnesson, Øyvind (December 1, 1999). "Mahatma Gandhi, the Missing Laureates". Nobel Foundation. Archived from the original on January 9, 2010. Retrieved January 3, 2010. Later, there have been speculations that the committee members could have had another deceased peace worker than Gandhi in mind when they declared that there was "no suitable living candidate", namely the Swedish UN envoy to Palestine, Count Bernadotte, who was murdered in September 1948. Today, this can be ruled out; Bernadotte had not been nominated in 1948. Thus it seems reasonable to assume that Gandhi would have been invited to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize had he been alive one more year.
