Five things to know about the Nobel Prize

Since 1901, the Nobel Prizes have been awarded to individuals and organisations for work leading to great advances for humanity, in line with the wishes of the prizes’ founder, inventor Alfred Nobel.

The 2026 winners will be announced between October 5 and 12, starting with the Nobel Prize in Medicine on Monday from 11:30 am (0930 GMT).

Here are five things to know about the prizes and their founder.

– In detention –

Since 1901, five Nobel Peace Prize laureates have been prevented from attending the awards ceremony in Oslo.

In 1936, German journalist and pacifist Carl von Ossietzky was detained in a Nazi concentration camp.

Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was under house arrest when she won the prize in 1991. Given permission by the junta to travel, she declined for fear of potentially not being able to return to her country.

In 2010, Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo was in prison. His chair remained empty, where the prize was placed.

In 2022, Belarusian human rights campaigner Ales Bialiatski was in jail. He was represented by his wife Natalia Pinchuk.

In 2023, Iranian activist Narges Mohammadi was held in Iran’s Evin prison when the prize was awarded.

– Young and old –

In 2014, 17-year-old Pakistani human rights activist Malala Yousafzai became the youngest winner of a Nobel Prize.

Another unusually young laureate was Australia’s Lawrence Bragg, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with his father in 1915 when he was 25, for work carried out at the age of 21.

Iraqi Nadia Murad was also awarded the Nobel Peace Prize at the age of 25 in 2018 for her efforts on behalf of the Yazidi minority.

In contrast, American John Goodenough was the oldest to become a Nobel laureate. He won the Prize in Chemistry in 2019 at the age of 97 for his work on the lithium-ion batteries that power smartphones and electric cars.

The year before, his compatriot Arthur Ashkin was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics at the age of 96.

– Posthumous awards –

Since 1974, the statutes of the Nobel Foundation stipulate that the prize may not be given posthumously.

But the prize may still be awarded if the recipient dies between the time of the announcement in October and the formal prize ceremony in December.

Before the change, only two people had won a Nobel posthumously.

One was Dag Hammarskjold, the Swedish secretary-general of the United Nations, who died in a plane crash in 1961 but was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize later the same year.

And in 1931, the Nobel Literature Prize was awarded posthumously to another Swede, poet Erik Axel Karlfeldt.

In 2011, the committee for the Nobel Prize in Medicine selected Ralph Steinman of Canada, unaware that he had passed away just three days before the announcement.

The foundation nevertheless gave him the award.

– Women laureates –

Only 68 of the 633 Nobel prizes awarded since 1901 have been given to women, representing about 10 percent, though the share has been steadily increasing since the early 2020s.

The science fields have the lowest representation of women laureates. The various committees that award the prizes have repeatedly refused to introduce quotas, instead encouraging nominations of women scientists.

Only five women have won a Nobel physics prize out of a total of 230 laureates in the discipline, three out of 99 economics laureates, eight out of 200 chemistry laureates, and 14 out of 232 medicine laureates.

Marie Curie was the first woman laureate in 1903 and she is to this day the only woman to have received two Nobel prizes, first for physics in 1903 and then in 1911 in chemistry.

– Nobel the poet –

Nobel went down in history as the inventor of dynamite but he also loved English poetry and was an admirer of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Byron.

He wrote poetry himself his entire life, sometimes in his native Swedish but mostly in English.

In a letter to a friend, he wrote: “I have not the slightest pretension to call my verses poetry; I write now and then for no other purpose than to relieve depression, or to improve my English.”

In 1862, at the age of 29 and questioning his literary talent, he sent a letter in French to a young woman that said: “Physics is my field, not writing.”

In 1896, the year of his death, he wrote a scandalous tragedy in four acts titled “Nemesis”, inspired by Shelley’s play “The Cenci” about a woman in 16th-century Rome who murders her incestuous father.

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