Nobel

DAKAR, Senegal — Nobel Prize-winning author Wole Soyinka said his non-resident visa to enter the United States had been rejected, adding that he believes it may be because he recently criticized President Trump.

The Nigerian author, 91, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, becoming the first African to do so.

Speaking to the press on Tuesday, Soyinka said he believed it had little to do with him and was instead a product of the United States’ immigration policies. He said he was told to reapply if he wished to enter again.

“It’s not about me, I’m not really interested in going back to the United States,” he said. “But a principle is involved. Human beings deserve to be treated decently wherever they are.”

Soyinka, who has taught in the U.S. and previously held a green card, joked on Tuesday that his green card “had an accident” eight years ago and “fell between a pair of scissors.” In 2017, he destroyed his green card in protest over Trump’s first inauguration.

The letter he received informing him of his visa revocation cites “additional information became available after the visa was issued,” as the reason for its revocation, but does not describe what that information was.

Soyinka believes it may be because he recently referred to Trump as a “white version of Idi Amin,” a reference to the dictator who ruled Uganda from 1971 until 1979.

He jokingly referred to his rejection as a “love letter” and said that while he did not blame the officials, he would not be applying for another visa.

“I have no visa. I am banned, obviously, from the United States, and if you want to see me, you know where to find me.”

The U.S. Consulate in Nigeria’s commercial hub, Lagos, directed all questions to the State Department in Washington, D.C., which did not respond to immediate requests for comment.

Mcmakin writes for the Associated Press.

The United States has revoked the visa of Nigerian author and playwright Wole Soyinka, who became the first African writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986.

Speaking at Kongi’s Harvest Gallery in Lagos on Tuesday, Soyinka read aloud from a notice sent on October 23 from the local US consulate, asking him to arrive with his passport so that his visa could be nullified.

The author called it, with characteristic humour, a “rather curious love letter” to receive.

“We request you bring your visa to the US Consulate General Lagos for physical cancellation. To schedule an appointment, please email — et cetera, et cetera — in advance of the appointment,” Soyinka recited, skimming the letter.

Closing his laptop, the author joked with the audience that he did not have time to fulfil its request.

“I like people who have a sense of humour, and this is one of the most humorous sentences or requests I’ve had in all my life,” Soyinka said.

“Would any of you like to volunteer in my place? Take the passport for me? I’m a little bit busy and rushed.”

Soyinka’s visa was issued last year, under US President Joe Biden. But in the intervening time, a new president has taken office: Donald Trump.

Since beginning his second term in January, Trump has overseen a crackdown on immigration, and his administration has removed visas and green cards from individuals whom it sees as out of step with the Republican president’s policies.

At Tuesday’s event, Soyinka struck a bemused tone, though he indicated the visa revocation would prevent him from visiting the US for literary and cultural events.

“I want to assure the consulate, the Americans here, that I am very content with the revocation of my visa,” Soyinka said.

He also quipped about his past experiences writing about the Ugandan military leader Idi Amin. “Maybe it’s about time also to write a play about Donald Trump,” he said.

Nobel Prize winners in the crosshairs

Soyinka is a towering figure in African literature, with a career that spans genres, from journalism to poetry to translation.

He is the author of several novels, including Season of Anomy and Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, as well as numerous short stories.

The 91-year-old author has also championed the fight against censorship. “Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth,” he wrote.

He has lectured on the subject in New York City for PEN America, a free speech nonprofit. As recently as 2021, he returned to the US to present scholar and former colleague Henry Louis Gates Jr with the nonprofit’s Literary Service Award.

But Soyinka is not the first Nobel winner to see his US visa stripped away in the wake of Trump’s return to office, despite the US president’s own ambitions of earning the international prize.

Oscar Arias, a former president of Costa Rica and the winner of the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize, also found his visa cancelled in April.

Arias was previously honoured by the Nobel Committee for his efforts to end armed conflicts in Central American countries like Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala.

While the letter Arias received from the US government gave no reason for his visa’s cancellation, the former president told NPR’s Morning Edition radio show that officials indicated it was because of his ties to China.

“During my second administration from 2006 to 2010, I established diplomatic relations with China, and that’s because it has the second-largest economy in the world,” Arias explained.

But, Arias added, he could not rule out the possibility that there were other reasons for his visa’s removal.

“I have to imagine that my criticism of President Trump might have played a role,” Arias told NPR. “The president has a personality that is not open to criticism or disagreements.”

Soyinka likewise has a reputation for being outspoken, both about domestic politics in his native Nigeria and international affairs.

He has, for example, denounced Trump on multiple occasions, including for the “brutal, cruel and often unbelievable treatment being meted out to strangers, immigrants”.

In 2017, he confirmed to the magazine The Atlantic that he had destroyed his US green card — his permanent residency permit — to protest Trump’s first election in 2016.

“As long as Trump is in charge, if I absolutely have to visit the United States, I prefer to go in the queue for a regular visa with others,” he told the magazine.

The point was, he explained, to show that he was “no longer part of the society, not even as a resident”.

In Tuesday’s remarks, Soyinka reaffirmed that he no longer had his green card. “Unfortunately, when I was looking at my green card, it fell between the fingers of a pair of scissors, and it got cut into a couple of pieces,” he said, flashing his tongue-in-cheek humour.

He also emphasised he continues to have close friends in the US, and that the local consulate staff has consistently treated him courteously.

His work had long caused him to face persecution in Nigeria — though, famously, during a stint in solitary confinement, he continued to write using toilet paper — and eventually, in the 1990s, he sought refuge in the US.

During his time in North America, he took up teaching posts at prestigious universities like Harvard, Yale and Emory.

Targeting ‘hostile attitudes’

The Trump administration, however, has pledged to revoke visas from individuals it deems to be a threat to its national security and foreign policy interests.

In June, Trump issued a proclamation calling on his government tighten immigration procedures, in an effort to ensure that visa-holders “do not bear hostile attitudes toward its citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles”.

What qualifies as a “hostile attitude” towards US culture is unclear. Human rights advocates have noted that such broad language could be used as a smokescreen to crack down on dissent.

Free speech, after all, is protected under the First Amendment of the US Constitution and is considered a foundational principle in the country, protecting individual expression from government shackles.

After Arias was stripped of his visa, the Economists for Peace and Security, a United Nations-accredited nonprofit, was among those to express outrage.

“This action, taken without explanation, raises serious concerns about the treatment of a globally respected elder statesman who has dedicated his life to peace, democracy, and diplomacy,” the nonprofit wrote in its statement.

“Disagreements on foreign policy or political perspective should not lead to punitive measures against individuals who have made significant contributions to international peace and stability.”

International students, commenters on social media, and acting government officials have also faced backlash for expressing their opinions and having unfavourable foreign ties.

Earlier this month, Panamanian President Jose Raul Mulino voiced concern that members of his government had seen their visas cancelled over their diplomatic ties to China.

And in September, while visiting New York City, Colombian President Gustavo Petro saw his visa yanked within hours of giving a critical speech to the United Nations and participating in a protest against Israel’s war in Gaza.

The US Department of State subsequently called Petro’s actions “reckless and incendiary”.

Separately, the State Department announced on October 14 that six foreign nationals would see their visas annulled for criticising the assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk, a close associate of Trump.

Soyinka questioned Trump’s stated motives for cancelling so many visas at Tuesday’s literary event in Lagos, asking if they really made a difference for US national security.

“Governments have a way of papering things for their own survival,” he said.

“I want people to understand that the revocation of one visa, 10 visas, a thousand visas will not affect the national interests of any astute leader.”

The news comes just days after Maria Corina Machado was announced the winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo.

Venezuela says it will close its embassy in Norway, just days after Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado was announced the winner of the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo.

A Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson told the Reuters news agency that the Venezuelan embassy did not give a reason for shutting its doors for its decision on Monday.

“It is regrettable. Despite our differences on several issues, Norway wishes to keep the dialogue open with Venezuela and will continue to work in this direction,” the spokesperson said.

The ministry also stressed that the Nobel Committee overseeing the prize is an independent body from the Norwegian government.

Corina Machado, who has been in hiding since 2024, was declared the Nobel Peace Prize winner on Friday for her “extraordinary examples of civilian courage in Latin America in recent times”.

She was barred from standing in last year’s election in Venezuela, which was won by President Nicolas Maduro in a widely disputed result.

Corina Machado dedicated her Nobel Prize win to United States President Donald Trump and the “suffering people of Venezuela”.

Venezuela has also decided to shutter its embassy in Australia, in addition to Norway.

Instead, it plans to open two new embassies in Burkina Faso and Zimbabwe, countries it described as “strategic allies in the anti-colonial fight and in resistance to hegemonic pressures”.

Neither Norway nor Australia has an embassy in Venezuela, and consular services are handled by their embassies in Colombia.

Both countries are longtime allies of the US, which, under Trump, has launched an official war against Latin American drug cartels like Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua.

The US military has since September carried out at least four strikes on boats operated by alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean under orders from the White House.

Maduro has accused Washington of trying to instigate regime change in Venezuela and called for the United Nations Security Council to take action.

DONALD Trump has declared the Gaza ceasefire “the most important deal ever made” — even as he was snubbed for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

The US President, who brokered the landmark truce to end two years of bloodshed between Israel and Hamas, spoke just hours after the award went to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado.

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He insisted the breakthrough was “signed, sealed and already started” — and hailed it as the crowning achievement of a presidency he says has stopped eight wars.

“It’s certainly, I think, to the mind of most, the most important deal ever made in terms of peace,” Trump said on Friday.

The president said the ceasefire marked “a great deal for Israel, but it’s a great deal for everybody — for Arabs, for Muslims, for the world,” and confirmed that the release of hostages would begin on Monday.

“We’re getting them now. They’re gathering them from some pretty rough places on earth,” he said.

The decision to snub Trump came the day after Israel and Hamas signed a peace deal that he engineered to end the war and return the hostages.

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize was instead awarded to María Corina Machado – a Venezuelan politician and activist – for her “tireless work” organising the democratic opposition to dictatorship in Venezuela.

Trump has also announced 100 per cent tariffs on China in response to Beijing’s sweeping rare earth export controls – a major escalation in the fierce trade war between Washington and Beijing.

The US President accused China of taking an “extraordinarily aggressive position” on trade, slamming what he called an “extremely hostile letter to the world” that outlined measures to control “virtually every product they make”.

Posting on Truth Social, Trump vowed to hit back hard, saying he would also impose US export controls on any critical software heading to China.

Meanwhile, Venezuelan politician Machado dedicated the Nobel Prize to the US President.

She wrote on X: “This recognition of the struggle of all Venezuelans is a boost to conclude our task: to conquer Freedom.

“We are on the threshold of victory and today, more than ever, we count on President Trump, the people of the United States, the peoples of Latin America, and the democratic nations of the world as our principal allies to achieve Freedom and democracy.

“I dedicate this prize to the suffering people of Venezuela and to President Trump for his decisive support of our cause!”

Her post comes amidst heightened tensions between the two countries after Trump cut all diplomatic contacts with Venezuela during the US’s crackdown on drug cartels.

The Nobel Committee paid tribute to Machado’s “struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy”.

It said the award was in recognition of her “tireless work” to protect rights and fight for a transition to democracy in Venezuela.

Announcing the winner, Jørgen Watne Frydnes lauded her as “a woman who keeps the flame of democracy burning amidst a growing darkness”.

He said: “When authoritarians seize power, it is crucial to recognise courageous defenders of freedom who rise and resist.”

He later explained why the US president was not given the award.

He said: “I think this committee has seen [every] type of campaign [and] media attention. We receive thousands and thousands of letters every year of people saying what, for them, leads to peace.”

“But this committee sits in a room with the portraits of all laureates and that room is filled with both courage and integrity. So, we base only our decision on the work and will of Alfred Nobel.”

Machado has been living in hiding for the past year, after her fearless work incited “serious threats against her life”.

Troubled Venezuela is currently ruled by Nicolás Maduro, who is widely recognised as a dictator.

His government has routinely targeted its real or perceived opponents.

Machado, who turned 58 this week, was set to run against Maduro in last year’s presidential election, but the government disqualified her.

The election results announced by the Electoral Council sparked protests across the country to which the government responded with force that ended with more than 20 people dead.

Machado went into hiding and has not been seen in public since January.

Trump, who is in his second term as America’s president, has long wished for a Nobel Peace Prize.

He claims to have stopped seven conflicts in the world since his time in the office – and has made no secret of the fact that he believes he is worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Last week, he teased the possibility of ending an eighth war if Israel and Hamas agree to his peace plan aimed at concluding the nearly two-year war in Gaza.

And just hours before the Nobel Peace Prize results were set to be announced, Don revealed to the world that the two warring factions had signed a peace deal – one that he engineered.

It is indeed a massive breakthrough that is set to reshape the face of the Middle East – and the world is praising the US leaders’ effort to broker the deal.

However, the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which awards the prestigious peace prize, held its final meeting on Monday, the Nobel Institute said.

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This means that the decision to give the award to Machado was made before the conclusion of an agreement between Israel and Hamas on Wednesday night.

Historian Asle Sveen, a specialist in the Nobel Prize, said he was “one hundred per cent certain” that Trump will not win this year’s Nobel Prize.

He emphasised that the US president had long “given free rein” to Netanyahu to bomb Gaza and had provided significant military aid to Israel – something that the prize committee must have taken into account.

A global ‘peacemaker’

All eyes were on his nomination this year after the self-proclaimed peacemaker launched a campaign in a bid to win the award.

He has repeatedly asserted since his return to the White House in January that he deserves the nod, adding it would be “a big insult” to the United States if he were not given the prize.

In February this year, during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House, he said: “They will never give me a Nobel Peace Prize. I deserve it, but they will never give it to me.”

Even during his speech at the 80th UN General Assembly in New York, Trump said that “everyone” says he should get it.

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He said: “Everyone says that I should get the Nobel Peace Prize for each one of these achievements, but for me, the real prize will be the sons and daughters who live to grow up with their mothers and fathers, because millions of people are no longer being killed in endless and unglorious wars. 

“What I care about is not winning prizes as much as saving lives.”

Numerous world leaders endorsed him for the honour, including Netanyahu, who posted an AI-generated image of him awarding Trump the Nobel Prize.

Hun Manet, the prime minister of Cambodia, nominated Trump after a deal was struck for a ceasefire following the clashes at the Cambodia-Thailand border.

Olivier Nduhungirehe, the Rwandan foreign minister, credited Trump for how he helped end the 30-year conflict between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Pakistan also endorsed Trump for the prize this year. Though the Islamic Republic slammed him for bombing Iran in less than 24 hours.

Even Vladimir Putin backed Trump to win.

Putin said Russia supported Trump’s nomination as long as Washington did not supply long-range Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine.

Experts say the Nobel Prize committee may take Trump’s efforts to bring peace in Gaza – if it lasts – into consideration for next year’s award.

WASHINGTON — President Trump was passed over for the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday despite jockeying from his fellow Republicans, various world leaders and — most vocally — himself.

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado was awarded the prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee said it was honoring Machado “for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”

Machado, however, said she wanted to dedicate the win to Trump, along with the people of her country, as she praised the president for support of her cause.

The White House responded bitterly to the news of the award Friday, with communications director Steven Cheung saying members of “the Nobel Committee proved they place politics over peace” because they didn’t recognize Trump, especially after the Gaza ceasefire deal his administration helped strike this week.

“He has the heart of a humanitarian, and there will never be anyone like him who can move mountains with the sheer force of his will,” Cheung wrote on social media.

The White House did not comment on Machado’s recognition, but Trump on social media shared Machado’s post praising him.

Her opposition to President Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela aligns with the Trump administration’s own stance on Venezuela, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio previously praised her as “the personification of resilience, tenacity, and patriotism.”

Trump, who has long coveted the prestigious prize, has been outspoken about his desire for the honor during both of his presidential terms, particularly lately as he takes credit for ending conflicts around the world. The Republican president had expressed doubts that the Nobel committee would ever grant him the award.

“They’ll have to do what they do. Whatever they do is fine. I know this: I didn’t do it for that. I did it because I saved a lot of lives,” Trump said Thursday.

Although Trump received nominations for the prize, many of them occurred after the Feb. 1 deadline for the 2025 award, which fell just a week and a half into his second term. His name was, however, put forward in December by Republican Rep. Claudia Tenney of New York, her office said in a statement, for his brokering of the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states in 2020.

A long history of lobbying for the prize

Jørgen Watne Frydnes, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said the committee has seen various campaigns in its long history of awarding the peace prize.

“We receive thousands and thousands of letters every year of people wanting to say what for them leads to peace,” he said. “This committee sits in a room filled with the portraits of all laureates, and that room is filled with both courage and integrity. So we base only our decision on the work and the will of Alfred Nobel.”

The peace prize, first awarded in 1901, was created partly to encourage ongoing peace efforts. Alfred Nobel stipulated in his will that the prize should go to someone “who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

Three sitting U.S. presidents have won the Nobel Peace Prize: Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, Woodrow Wilson in 1919 and Barack Obama in 2009. Jimmy Carter won the prize in 2002, a full two decades after leaving office. Former Vice President Al Gore received the prize in 2007.

Obama, a Democrat who was a focus of Trump’s attacks well before the Republican was elected, won the prize early in his tenure as president.

“They gave it to Obama for doing absolutely nothing but destroying our country,” Trump said Thursday.

Wars in Gaza and elsewhere

As one of his reasons for deserving the award, Trump often says he has ended seven wars, though some of the conflicts the president claims to have resolved were merely tensions and his role in easing them is disputed.

But while there is hope for the end to Israel and Hamas’ war, with Israel saying a ceasefire agreement with Hamas came into effect Friday, much remains uncertain about the aspects of the broader plan, including whether and how Hamas will disarm and who will govern Gaza. And little progress seems to have been made in the Russia-Ukraine war, a conflict Trump claimed during the 2024 campaign that he could end in one day.

As Trump pushes for peaceful resolutions to conflicts abroad, the country he governs remains deeply divided and politically fraught. Trump has kicked off what he hopes to be the largest deportation program in American history to remove immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. He is using the levers of government, including the Justice Department, to go after his perceived political enemies. He has sent the military into U.S. cities over local opposition to stop crime and crack down on immigration enforcement.

He withdrew the United States from the landmark Paris climate agreement, dealing a blow to worldwide efforts to combat global warming. He touched off global trade wars with his on-again, off-again tariffs, which he wields as a threat to bend other countries and companies to his will. He asserted presidential war powers by declaring cartels to be unlawful combatants and launching lethal strikes on boats in the Caribbean that he alleged were carrying drugs.

The full list of people nominated is secret, but anyone who submits a nomination is free to talk about it. Trump’s detractors say supporters, foreign leaders and others are submitting Trump’s name for nomination for the prize — and announcing it publicly — not because he deserves it but because they see it as a way to manipulate him and stay in his good graces.

The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who this summer said he was nominating Trump for the prize, on Friday reposted Cheung’s response with the comment: “The Nobel Committee talks about peace. President @realDonaldTrump makes it happen.”

“The facts speak for themselves,” Netanyahu’s office said on X. “President #Trump deserves it.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who sent troops to Ukraine in 2022 and has sought to show alignment with Trump, told reporters in Taijikistan on Friday that it’s not up to him to judge whether Trump should have received the prize, but he praised the ceasefire deal for Gaza.

He also criticized the Nobel Committee’s prior decisions, saying it has in the past awarded the prize to those who have done little to advance global peace.

Putin’s remarks nearly echoed the comments Trump made about Obama, and the U.S. leader responded to his Russian counterpart’s praise by posting on social media: “Thank you to President Putin!”

Others who formally submitted a nomination for Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize — but after this year’s deadline — include Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet and Pakistan’s government, all citing his work in helping end conflicts in their regions.

Pesoli and Price write for the Associated Press. AP writers Chris Megerian in Washington, Geir Moulson in Berlin and Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow contributed to this report.

Donald Trump heading to Israel and Egypt on Sunday after Nobel Committee’s decision not to hand him Peace Prize after Gaza deal.

United States President Donald Trump is heading to the Middle East on Sunday as he looks to assert his perceived role as a peacemaker in the region after the Gaza ceasefire deal.

The visit would come days after the Nobel Peace Prize committee overlooked Trump’s public campaigning for the award and handed it to right-wing Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado.

The White House has bemoaned the snub, accusing the Norwegian Nobel Committee of putting “place politics over peace”.

But in the Middle East, Trump is likely to be showered with praise from his hosts and credited with securing an end to the war in Gaza and the release of Israeli captives in the territory.

The White House said on Friday that Trump will depart for the Middle East on Sunday night, according to Al Jazeera correspondent Alan Fisher. The US president will first arrive in Israel, where he will make an address on Monday, before continuing on to Egypt, Fisher reported from Washington DC.

Israel and Hamas have already lauded Trump’s role in the negotiations.

But analysts stress that for the deal to turn into long-term peace in Gaza, rather than another brief truce, the US president must pressure Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against restarting the bombardment after the Israeli captives are released.

“I think that Donald Trump wants to oversee this very closely, and I think he wants to continue to send the message to Netanyahu that this is it. At least, that’s what I’m hoping,” said Mohamad Elmasry, a professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies.

“I assume he’s going to go and say very nice things about Benjamin Netanyahu; that’s what he always does publicly. But let’s hope, let’s hope, that he’s going to apply pressure.”

While Trump is taking much of the credit for the deal, experts say other factors pushed the truce over the line, more than two years into the brutal Israeli assault that United Nations investigators have concluded is a genocide.

Yousef Munayyer, head of the Palestine/Israel programme at the Arab Center Washington DC, said after destroying more than 80 percent of the buildings in Gaza while failing to free the captives, Israel was getting “diminishing returns” from its campaign in the territory.

“Israel is facing growing isolation and costs for continuing down this road. And I think there are also Israeli domestic political factors that influenced the timing of this as well,” Munayyer told Al Jazeera.

Similar proposals to the Trump plan have been on the table for the past two years, but Netanyahu has insisted on continuing the war.

However, the latest ceasefire comes at a time when countries across the world, including some of Israel’s Western allies, are condemning its blockade on Gaza and belligerence across the region, including its attack on Qatar last month.

Despite the international outrage, Israel has continued to receive military and diplomatic support from the US.

Not only did the Trump administration fail to denounce Israel’s policy of imposed starvation in Gaza, it also backed the GHF aid scheme to militarise humanitarian assistance, which killed hundreds of aid seekers.

As Trump celebrates his version of peace in the Middle East, rights advocates say there can be no true stability in the region without ending the occupation and ensuring accountability for the genocide in Gaza.

Nancy Okail, head of the Center for International Policy (CIP) think tank, warned that normalising the horrific abuses in Gaza could lead to the collapse of international institutions.

“If there’s no accountability for what happened in Gaza, it’s a licence for others to do similar things, and that weakens and puts everyone in jeopardy,” she told Al Jazeera.

Oct. 10 (UPI) — María Corina Machado, a Venezuelan opposition leader who has worked to restore democracy to her country, won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced Friday.

The committee hailed Machado as “one of the most extraordinary examples of civilian courage in Latin America in recent times” for her work to promote human rights and attempts to end the dictatorship of President Nicolás Maduro.

“Ms. Machado has been a key, unifying figure in a political opposition that was once deeply divided — an opposition that found common ground in the demand for free elections and representative government,” a news release from the committee said.

“This is precisely what lies at the heart of democracy: our shared willingness to defend the principles of popular rule, even though we disagree. At a time when democracy is under threat, it is more important than ever to defend this common ground.”

As a leader of the Vente Venezuela, a centrist liberal political party, Machado ran for president in 2011 and 2024. The former National Assembly member was the candidate chosen to run against Maduro, representing a variety of opposition groups in the 2024 election.

The Venezuelan government, however, banned her from participating in the election for her earlier activism against the Maduro regime. The ban was instituted for 15 years. The government also accused Machado of planning to assassinate Maduro.

In 2002, Machado was a co-founder of Súmate, an election-monitoring organization that trained volunteers to observe polling locations to ensure all votes were fairly and accurately counted in Venezuelan elections.

“It was a choice of ballots over bullets,” she said of her involvement in the organization.

She later left Súmate to prevent the group from becoming politicized.

“María Corina Machado meets all three criteria stated in Alfred Nobel‘s will for the selection of a Peace Prize laureate,” the Nobel Committee said.

“She has brought her country’s opposition together. She has never wavered in resisting the militarization of Venezuelan society. She has been steadfast in her support for a peaceful transition to democracy.”

The 2025 Nobel Peace Prize is scheduled to be announced on Friday, October 10, at 11:00 am local time in Oslo, Norway (09:00 GMT).

The announcement comes from the Norwegian Nobel Institute on behalf of the all-Norwegian, five-member Nobel Committee, appointed by the Norwegian Parliament and responsible for selecting and presenting the laureates.

Nominations for this year’s award closed on January 31, and the selection process remains shrouded in secrecy.

A brief history of the Nobel Prize

The Nobel Prizes are named after Alfred Nobel (1833–1896), a Swedish chemist, engineer and industrialist best known for inventing dynamite, an explosive that transformed the modern world through advances in construction and mining, but which was also responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people in wars.

Motivated by a desire to shape his legacy, Nobel left a multimillion-dollar fortune to fund annual prizes, awarded to those who “have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind” in the preceding year.

The first Nobel Prizes were awarded in 1901 for outstanding achievement in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace.

In 1968, Sweden’s central bank, Sveriges Riksbank, established the Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, expanding the categories to six.

So far this year, four Nobel Prizes have been announced. After the Peace Prize on October 10, the final award for economics will be revealed on October 13.

Who can be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize?

The Nobel Peace Prize is meant to recognise individuals and organisations that have made exceptional efforts to promote peace, resolve conflicts and advance human rights.

The 2025 Nobel Peace Prize has 338 nominees, including 244 individuals and 94 organisations, up from 286 candidates in 2024.

Nominations are kept confidential, and committee members are prohibited from discussing their decisions for 50 years. Only the nominators themselves may choose to disclose their submissions.

While a person cannot nominate themselves, they may be nominated multiple times by others.

This year, United States President Donald Trump has become a focus of Nobel Peace Prize nominations. Trump, who has said, “Everyone says I should get the Nobel Peace Prize,” has received several endorsements: Israel, Cambodia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Pakistan, even as many have questioned his credentials.

While many well-known figures have been nominated in the past but never received the Nobel Peace Prize, the names most frequently searched in the Nobel nomination database are Adolf Hitler, Mahatma Gandhi and Joseph Stalin.

These individuals represent vastly different legacies: Hitler was nominated in 1939 as a satirical gesture, Gandhi was nominated multiple times between 1937 and 1948 but never awarded, and Stalin was nominated in 1945 and 1948 for his role in ending World War II.

Who has received the Nobel Peace Prize?

As of 2024, the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded 105 times to 142 laureates – 111 individuals and 31 organisations.

Among the individual recipients, 92 are men and 19 are women.

The youngest laureate to date is Malala Yousafzai, who received the award at the age of 17 in 2014, while the oldest is Joseph Rotblat, honoured at 86 for his work against nuclear weapons.

The International Committee of the Red Cross holds the record for the most Peace Prizes, having been recognised three times, followed by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which has won twice.

Geographically, Europe accounts for the largest share of laureates at 45 percent, followed by North America (20 percent), Asia (16 percent), Africa (9 percent) and South America (3 percent).

In addition, United Nations organisations represent about 7 percent of all Nobel Peace Prize recipients.

When was the Peace Prize not awarded?

The Nobel Peace Prize has not been awarded every year.

It was skipped on 19 occasions, specifically in 1914–1916, 1918, 1923, 1924, 1928, 1932, 1939–1943, 1948, 1955–1956, 1966–1967, and 1972, usually due to war or the absence of a suitable candidate.

According to the statutes of the Nobel Foundation, if none of the candidates’ work is deemed significant enough, the prize may be withheld and the prize money carried forward to the next year. If it still cannot be awarded, the amount is transferred to the Foundation’s restricted funds.

One notable instance came in 1948, the year Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated. Gandhi had been nominated several times – in 1937, 1938, 1939, 1947, and again in 1948 – for his nonviolent leadership of India’s freedom movement. In 1948, the Nobel Committee chose not to award the prize, citing “no suitable living candidate”, widely seen as an implicit tribute to him.

Has anyone refused the award?

The Nobel Peace Prize has only been refused on one occasion.

In 1973, Vietnamese politician Le Duc Tho and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were awarded the prize for their efforts to end the Vietnam War.

Tho declined the award, citing the ongoing conflict in Vietnam.

The Vietnam War lasted from the late 1950s to 1975, ending with the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, and killed millions of people.

Has the award ever been shared?

Yes, very often. Out of the 105 awards presented so far:

• 71 prizes were given to a single laureate,
• 31 prizes were shared between two laureates, and
• 3 prizes were shared among three laureates.

According to the Nobel Foundation’s statutes, a prize can be divided equally between two recipients or shared among up to three if their work is considered to merit the award jointly. The prize cannot be divided among more than three people.

Who are all the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize?

The table below lists all Nobel Peace Prize laureates from 1901 to 2024, along with their country of origin.

STAVANGER, Norway — President Trump’s bid to win the Nobel Peace Prize has drawn added attention to the annual guessing game over who its next laureate will be.

Longtime Nobel watchers say Trump’s prospects remain remote despite a flurry of high-profile nominations and some notable foreign policy interventions for which he has taken personal credit.

Experts say the Norwegian Nobel Committee typically focuses on the durability of peace, the promotion of international fraternity and the quiet work of institutions that strengthen those goals. Trump’s own record might even work against him, they said, citing his apparent disdain for multilateral institutions and his disregard for global climate change concerns.

Still, the U.S. leader has repeatedly sought the Nobel spotlight since his first term, most recently telling United Nations delegates late last month “everyone says that I should get the Nobel Peace Prize.”

A person cannot nominate themself.

Public lobbying campaigns but a private committee decision

Trump’s boasts and previous high-profile nominations make him the blockbuster name on the list of bookmakers’ favorites. But it’s unclear whether his name comes up in conversation when the five-member Nobel committee, appointed by Norway’s parliament, meets behind closed doors.

Trump has been nominated several times by people within the U.S. as well as politicians abroad since 2018. His name also was put forward in December by U.S. Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-NY), her office said in a statement, for his brokering of the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states in 2020.

Nominations made this year from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Pakistan’s government occurred after the Feb. 1 deadline for the 2025 award.

Trump has said repeatedly that he “deserves” the prize and claims to have “ended seven wars.” Last week, he teased the possibility of ending an eighth war if Israel and Hamas agree to his peace plan aimed at concluding the nearly two-year war in Gaza.

“Nobody’s ever done that,” he told a gathering of military leaders at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. “Will you get the Nobel Prize? Absolutely not. They’ll give it to some guy that didn’t do a damn thing.”

Israel and Hamas have since agreed to the first phase of the peace plan for Gaza, paving the way for a pause in the fighting and the release of the remaining hostages held by Hamas in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. In the early hours of Thursday, families of hostages and their supporters started chanting “Nobel prize to Trump” as they gathered in Tel Aviv’s hostages square.

Sustained peace efforts prioritized over quick wins

Nobel veterans say the committee prioritizes sustained, multilateral efforts over quick diplomatic wins. Theo Zenou, a historian and research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, said Trump’s efforts have not yet been proven to be long-lasting.

“There’s a huge difference between getting fighting to stop in the short term and resolving the root causes of the conflict,” Zenou said.

Zenou also highlighted Trump’s dismissive stance on climate change as out-of-step with what many, including the Nobel committee, see as the planet’s greatest long-term peace challenge.

“I don’t think they would award the most prestigious prize in the world to someone who does not believe in climate change,” Zenou said. “When you look at previous winners who have been bridge-builders, embodied international cooperation and reconciliation: These are not words we associate with Donald Trump.”

Avoiding political pressure

The Nobel committee was met with fierce criticism in 2009 for giving then-U.S. President Barack Obama the prize barely nine months into his first term. Many argued Obama had not been in office long enough to have an impact worthy of the Nobel.

And Trump’s own outspokenness about possibly winning the award might work against him: The committee won’t want to be seen as caving in to political pressure, said Nina Græger, director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo.

Trump’s prospects for the prize this year are “a long shot,” she said. “His rhetoric does not point in a peaceful perspective.”

The Nobel announcements began with the prize in medicine on Monday, and continued with physics on Tuesday and chemistry on Wednesday. The literature prize is being awarded on Thursday. The winner of the prize in economics will be announced on Monday.

Lewis writes for the Associated Press. Stefanie Dazio in Berlin and Darlene Superville in Quantico, Va., contributed to this reporting.

STOCKHOLM — Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, whose philosophical, bleakly funny novels often unfold in single sentences, won the Nobel Prize in literature Thursday for his “compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”

The Nobel judges praised his “artistic gaze which is entirely free of illusion, and which sees through the fragility of the social order combined with his unwavering belief in the power of art,” Steve Sem-Sandberg of the Nobel committee said at the announcement.

“László Krasznahorkai is a great epic writer in the Central European tradition that extends through (Franz) Kafka to Thomas Bernhard, and is characterized by absurdism and grotesque excess,” the Nobel judges said.

The work that won the Nobel Prize in literature

Zsuzsanna Varga, a Hungarian literature expert at the University of Glasgow, said Krasznahorkai’s apocalyptic and surreal novels probe the “utter hopelessness of the condition of human existence,” while also managing to be “incredibly funny.”

Varga said Krasznahorkai’s near-endless sentences made his books the “Hotel California” of literature – once readers get into it, “you can never leave.”

Other books include “The Melancholy of Resistance,” a surreal, disturbing tale set in a small Hungarian town, and “Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming,” the sprawling saga of a gambling-addicted aristocrat.

Several works, including his debut, “Satantango,” and “The Melancholy of Resistance” were turned into films by Hungarian director Béla Tarr.

Varga suggested readers new to Krasznahorkai’s work start with “Satantango,” his debut, which set the tone for what was to follow.

“Satan who is dancing a tango — I mean, how surreal can you be?” she said.

Krasznahorkai has also written several books inspired by his travels to China and Japan, including “A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East,” published in Hungarian in 2003.

How Krasznahorkai came to win

Sem-Sandberg said that Krasznahorkai had been on the Nobel radar for some time, “and he has been writing and creating one outstanding work after another.” He called his literary output “almost half a century of pure excellence.”

Krasznahorkai, 71, couldn’t immediately be reached for his reaction. He didn’t speak at the announcement.

He was born in the southeastern Hungarian city of Gyula, near the border with Romania, and has since traveled the world. Throughout the 1970s, he studied law at universities in Szeged and Budapest before shifting his focus to literature.

Krasznahorkai has been a vocal critic of autocratic Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, especially his government’s lack of support for Ukraine after the Russian invasion.

But in a post on Facebook, Orbán was quick to congratulate the writer, saying: “The pride of Hungary, the first Nobel Prize winner from Gyula, László Krasznahorkai. Congratulations!”

In an interview with Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet earlier this year, Krasznahorkai expressed criticism both of Orbán’s political system and the nationalism present in Hungarian society.

“There is no hope left in Hungary today and it is not only because of the Orbán regime,” he told the paper. “The problem is not only political, but also social.”

He also reflected on the fact that he has long been a contender for the Nobel Prize in literature, saying: “I don’t want to lie. It would be very interesting to get that prize. But I would be very surprised if I got it.”

Previous awards for Krasznahorkai and the other Nobels this year

Krasznahorkai has received many earlier awards, including the 2015 Man Booker International Prize. The Booker judges praised his “extraordinary sentences, sentences of incredible length that go to incredible lengths, their tone switching from solemn to madcap to quizzical to desolate as they go their wayward way.”

He also won the National Book Award for Translated Literature in the U.S. in 2019 for “Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming.”

The American writer and critic Susan Sontag once described Krasznahorkai as the “contemporary master of the Apocalypse.” He was also friends with American poet and writer Allen Ginsberg and would regularly stay in Ginsberg’s apartment while visiting New York City.

He’s the first winner from Hungary since Imre Kertesz in 2002. He joins an illustrious list of laureates that includes Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison and Kazuo Ishiguro.

The literature prize has been awarded by the Nobel committee of the Swedish Academy 117 times to a total of 121 winners. Last year’s prize was won by South Korean author Han Kang for her body of work that the committee said “confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”

The literature prize is the fourth to be announced this week, following the 2025 Nobels in medicine, physics and chemistry.

The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday. The final Nobel, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, will be announced on Monday.

Nobel Prize award ceremonies are held on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896. Nobel was a wealthy Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite who founded the prizes.

Each prize carries an award of nearly $1.2 million, and the winners also receive an 18-carat gold medal and a diploma.

Manenkov, Lawless and Corder write for the Associated Press. Corder reported from The Hague, Netherlands, and Lawless from London. Justin Spike contributed to this report from Budapest, Hungary.

Oct. 9 (UPI) — On this date in history:

In 1888, 40 years after construction began, the Washington Monument opens to the public. Work on the obelisk was halted from 1854 to 1877 due to a lack of funds, internal squabbling within the Washington National Monument Society, and the American Civil War.

In 1919, the Cincinnati Reds won the World Series defeating the Chicago White Sox. Eight members of the White Sox would be accused of intentionally losing games in exchange for money from gamblers in what would become known as the Black Sox Scandal. The players were later found not guilty, though all were banned from the sport for life.

In 1931, gangster Al Capone’s Florida spending told at tax evasion trial. The government’s contention was that if Mr. Capone was “rich enough to be a moviesque Florida Play-boy, then he certainly must have an income worthy of taxation.”

File Photo by Bill Greenblatt/UPI

In 1931, the Japanese government endorsed military action against Manchuria. The invasion was one of a series of battles and skirmishes which took place in the run-up to the Second Sino-Japanese War.

In 1934, King Alexander of Yugoslavia was assassinated by a Croatian terrorist during a state visit to France.

In 1967, one day after being captured in the jungles of Bolivia where he was waging a guerrilla war, Marxist revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara, a leading figure in the 1959 Cuban revolution, is executed by the Bolivian military.

In 1975, Andrei Sakharov, father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, became the first Soviet citizen to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

In 1983, James Watt, facing U.S. Senate condemnation for a racially insensitive remark, resigned as U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s interior secretary.

In 1992, NASA announced that the unmanned Pioneer spacecraft was apparently lost after orbiting Venus for 14 years.

File Image courtesy of NASA

In 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”

In 2012, Malala Yousafzai, an advocate for girls’ education in Pakistan and future Nobel Peace Prize winner, survived being shot three times as she attempted to board a bus to school.

In 2015, the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet won the Nobel Peace Prize for its role in building up democracy in Tunisia after the Jasmine Revolution of 2011.

In 2020, the United Nations’ World Food Program won the Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts to fight hunger and bring peace to parts of the world affected by violence.

In 2024, Hurricane Milton made landfall near Sarasota, Fla., knocking out power for nearly 3 million people. The storm led to dozens of deaths and caused nearly $35 million in damage.

File Photo by Joe Marino/UPI

US scientist Dr Fred Ramsdell was on the last day of a three-week hike with his wife Laura O’Neill and their two dogs, deep in Montana’s grizzly bear country, when Ms O’Neill suddenly started screaming.

But it was not a predator that had disturbed the quiet of their off-grid holiday: it was a flurry of text messages bearing the news that Dr Ramsdell had won the Nobel Prize for medicine.

Dr Ramsdell, whose phone had been on airplane mode when the Nobel committee tried to call him, told the BBC’s Newshour Programme that his first response when his wife said, “You’ve won the Nobel prize” was: “I did not.”

To which Ms O’Neill replied that she had 200 text messages that suggested he had.

Dr Ramsdell, along with two other scientists, won the prize for their research into how the immune system attacks hostile infections.

The winners share a prize fund worth 11m Swedish kronor (£870,000).

After Ms O’Neill received the messages, the couple drove down to a small town in southern Montana in search of good phone signal.

“By then it was probably three o’clock in the afternoon here, I called the Nobel Committee. Of course they were in bed, because it was probably one o’clock in the morning there,” Dr Ramsell said.

Eventually, the immunologist was able to reach his fellow laureates, friends and officials at the Nobel Assembly – 20 hours after they first tried to reach him.

“So it was an interesting day,” he said.

Dr Thomas Perlmann, the secretary-general of the Nobel Assembly, told the New York Times it was the most difficult attempt to contact a winner since he assumed the role in 2016.

While the committee was trying to reach him, he “was living his best life and was off the grid on a preplanned hiking trip,” a spokesperson for his lab, Sonoma Biotherapeutics, said.

When asked by the BBC whether he thought it might be a trick that his wife might play on him, Dr Ramsdell said: “I have a lot of friends, but they’re not coordinated enough to pull off this joke, not with that many of them at the same time.”

It was the latest incident in an often comic history of laureates learning they had won the prize.

In 2020, economist Paul Milgrom unplugged the phone when the Nobel committee called – in the middle of the night – to tell him he had won the Nobel for economics.

Instead, his co-winner Bob Wilson was forced to walk over to Milgrom’s house, dressed in his pyjamas, and deliver the news through the security camera on his front door.

When a journalist informed the novelist Doris Lessing she had won the 2007 Nobel Prize for literature, she responded: “Oh, Christ.”

Oct. 7 (UPI) — Three U.S.-based scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics for their work in quantum mechanics on a macroscopic scale, the Nobel Foundation announced Tuesday.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded British-born John Clarke (University of California, Berkeley), French-born Michel H. Devoret (Yale University and UC Santa Barbara) and American John M. Martinis (UC Santa Barbara) the prestigious award. It comes with a $1.17 million prize the three men will split evenly.

The scientists are being recognized for creating an electrical circuit system large enough to be held in the hand that demonstrated both quantum mechanical tunneling and quantized energy levels, or specific, measurable amounts of energy.

Tunneling is the ability for particles to move through a barrier. Once a large number of particles are involved, they’re typically unable to move through this barrier, also called a Josephson junction.

“The laureates’ experiments demonstrated that quantum mechanical properties can be made concrete on a macroscopic scale,” a release from the Nobel Foundation said.

Olle Eriksson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, applauded the work by the three scientists.

“It is wonderful to be able to celebrate the way that century-old quantum mechanics continually offers new surprises,” he said. “It is also enormously useful, as quantum mechanics is the foundation for all digital technology.”

DEVELOPING STORYDEVELOPING STORY,

This year’s winners of the prize, John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret, and John M. Martinis, are based in the United States.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret, and John M. Martinis for quantum mechanic tunnelling.

“This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics has provided opportunities for developing the next generation of quantum technology, including quantum cryptography, quantum computers, and quantum sensors,” the prize-awarding body said in a statement.

The three winners are based in the United States.

The Nobel physics prize is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and includes a prize sum totalling 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.2 million) that is shared among the winners if there are several, as is often the case.

Past winners of the Nobel physics prize include some of the most influential figures in the history of science, such as Albert Einstein, Pierre and Marie Curie, Max Planck and Niels Bohr, a pioneer of quantum theory.

This is a developing news story…

DEVELOPING STORYDEVELOPING STORY,

The international team discovered how the immune system is kept in check to prevent it attacking the body.

The Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine has been awarded to Mary E Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi for their work on the functioning of the human immune system.

The award, announced by Sweden’s Karolinska Institute on Monday, will be presented to the trio in December for “their groundbreaking discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance that prevents the immune system from harming the body”.

The research “relates to how we keep our immune system under control so we can fight all imaginable microbes and still avoid autoimmune disease”, said Marie Wahren-Herlenius, a rheumatology professor at the Karolinska Institute.

The prize of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1.17m) is to be shared equally between Brunkow and Ramsdell of the United States and Japan’s Sakaguchi. The king of Sweden will also present them with gold medals.

“Their discoveries have laid the foundation for a new field of research and spurred the development of new treatments, for example for cancer and autoimmune diseases,” the prize-awarding body said in a statement.

The prize for medicine kicks off the annual Nobel awards, arguably the most prestigious prizes in science, literature, peace and economics. The winners of the remaining prizes will be announced over the coming days.

US President Donald Trump has asserted numerous times that he should receive the Nobel Peace Prize, having claimed to have halted seven wars since taking office at the start of the year.

However, regardless of apparent resistance among the assemblies that select the winners, the US president is unlikely to receive this year’s peace prize, as nominations had to be made in January.

This is a developing news story. More to come…

The Nobel Prize 2025 officially kicks off with the first award, for physiology or medicine, to be announced on Monday, setting the stage for a week of global anticipation.

The full schedule, spanning from October 6 to 13, maps out a rapid succession of announcements: medicine, followed by physics, chemistry, literature, peace, and finally culminating with the economics prize next Monday.

Here are the complete details of the schedule – and what to expect from this year’s Nobel Prizes.

What is the Nobel Prize?

The Nobel Prize is a set of the most prestigious international awards established by the will of Alfred Nobel, a Swedish chemist, engineer, and industrialist best known for discovering dynamite.

In his 1895 will, Nobel left the bulk of his fortune to fund annual prizes recognising those who “have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind” in the preceding year.

The first Nobel Prizes were awarded in 1901 for outstanding achievement in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace.

In 1968, Sweden’s central bank, Sveriges Riksbank, established the Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, expanding the categories to six.

Who awards the Nobel Prizes, and how much is the prize money?

The prizes are awarded by different institutions: the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (for physics, chemistry, and economics), the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institutet (for medicine), the Swedish Academy (for literature), and the Norwegian Nobel Committee (for peace).

Each laureate receives a gold medal, a diploma, and a cash award funded by the Nobel Foundation, which manages Nobel’s endowment. This year’s prize amounts to 11 million Swedish kronor ($1.2m), and a shot at overnight fame for the recipients.

The prizes are formally presented on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death in 1896.

What is this year’s Nobel Prizes schedule?

The announcements will start on Monday, October 6, and will end a week later, on October 13.

Monday, October 6: Physiology or medicine

Announced by the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet, Wallenbergsalen, Nobel Forum, Solna, near Stockholm.

Tuesday, October 7: Physics

Announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm.

Wednesday, October 8: Chemistry

Announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm.

Thursday, October 9: Literature

Announced by the Swedish Academy, Stockholm.

Friday, October 10: Peace

Announced at the Norwegian Nobel Institute by the Chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

Monday, October 13: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel

Announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm.

What is expected to dominate this year’s prizes?

Research into hormones that regulate appetite is leading speculation for this year’s Nobel Prize in medicine.

With more than a billion people worldwide affected by obesity, scientists behind the discovery of the hormone glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) are seen as frontrunners. Their work paved the way for a new class of antiobesity and diabetes drugs, including Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro, which have transformed global treatment approaches.

Experts say the likely honourees could include Jens Juul Holst, Joel Habener, Daniel Drucker, and Svetlana Mojsov, who were central to GLP-1’s discovery and development in the 1980s. Others point to Japanese researchers Kenji Kangawa and Masayasu Kojima for their work on ghrelin, a hormone that stimulates appetite, potentially forming a scientific “bookend” to earlier breakthroughs like the discovery of leptin in 1994.

Beyond medicine, there are some popular physics contenders, with experts citing breakthroughs in metamaterials, including British physicist John Pendry’s work on the so-called “invisibility cloak”, a method for redirecting electromagnetic fields around objects.

Why is the Nobel Peace Prize being watched closely this year?

The world is fraught with conflict, including an ongoing genocide in Gaza and mounting humanitarian crises in Ukraine, with civil wars and political repression in several countries.

However, the headlines and debates about this year’s Nobel Peace Prize are rather outsized and focused on United States President Donald Trump, for his relentless self-promotion — at times, claiming to deserve it for “ending seven wars”.

At the United Nations, Trump told delegates that “everyone says that I should get the Nobel Peace Prize”. On September 30, Trump reiterated that he “deserved” to win the prize for the possibility of ending an eighth war, given that Israel ended its two-year-long war in Gaza.

However, experts have noted that his chances are slim. The Norwegian Nobel Committee typically focuses on the durability of peace, the promotion of international fraternity, and the quiet work of institutions that strengthen those goals, experts have argued.

This year’s nominations for Trump include Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Pakistan’s government, though both were made after the deadline for the 2025 award.

One of the Nobel awarding bodies has also warned that academic freedom is under threat from the political interference by the Trump administration.

Ylva Engstrom, vice president of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the prizes for chemistry, physics and economics, said the Trump administration’s changes were reckless. ‘PILLAR OF DEMOCRATIC SYSTEM’ “I think in both the short and long term, it can have devastating effects,” she told the Reuters news agency in an interview. “Academic freedom … is one of the pillars of the democratic system.”

However, Engstrom is not herself on any of the three committees that will award the prizes for chemistry, physics, or economics.

What happens at the Nobel Prize ceremony?

Annually, on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death, the Nobel Prizes are formally awarded in twin ceremonies held in Stockholm and Oslo.

The Stockholm ceremony is attended by Sweden’s royal family, where laureates in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and economic sciences receive their medals and diplomas from the king of Sweden.

In Oslo, the Nobel Peace Prize is presented by the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee at the Oslo City Hall, honouring Nobel’s wish that the peace prize be awarded in Norway.

Laureates are individually called to the stage, where they receive the Nobel medal, diploma, and the monetary award. The ceremony also features speeches by committee chairs highlighting the significance of their discoveries or contributions.

The event is broadcast worldwide and followed by a lavish Nobel Banquet at Stockholm’s City Hall for more than 1,000 guests, including royal members, diplomats, scientists, and past laureates.

Who won these prizes last year?

Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun were awarded the 2024 prize for medicine for discovering microRNAs – tiny RNA molecules that regulate gene expression after transcription.

In physics, John J Hopfield and Geoffrey E Hinton received the prize for pioneering research that laid the theoretical and computational foundations of modern machine learning and artificial neural networks. While Hopfield’s models in the 1980s linked neuroscience and computation, Hinton’s work revolutionised deep learning, enabling advances in image recognition, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

In chemistry, the prize was shared by David Baker, Demis Hassabis, and John M Jumper for breakthroughs in predicting and designing protein structures using computational models. Baker was honoured for developing algorithms that enable scientists to design new proteins with specific functions, while Hassabis and Jumper, from Google’s DeepMind, were recognised for creating AlphaFold, the AI system that predicted nearly all known protein structures with unprecedented accuracy.

In the literature category, the prize went to Han Kang, a South Korean novelist known for her haunting explorations of violence, identity, and collective memory. Best known internationally for novels The Vegetarian and Human Acts, Han was cited “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”.

In the peace category, the prize was awarded to Nihon Hidankyo, the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organisations, honouring its decades-long campaign to abolish nuclear weapons and preserve the testimony of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors.

In economic sciences, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A Robinson shared the prize for their analysis of how institutions shape long-term economic growth and inequality. Their collaborative research, including the seminal work Why Nations Fail, demonstrated that inclusive political and economic institutions, rather than geography or culture, determine prosperity.

Trump has repeatedly said he averted a nuclear war, saved millions of lives – and grumbled that he got no credit for it.

Pakistan says it would recommend United States President Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, an accolade that he has said he craves.

In May, a surprise announcement by Trump of a ceasefire brought an abrupt end to a four-day conflict between nuclear-armed foes India and Pakistan.

Trump has since repeatedly said that he averted a nuclear war, saved millions of lives and grumbled that he got no credit for it.

Pakistan agrees that US diplomatic intervention ended the fighting, but India says it was a bilateral agreement between the two militaries.

“President Trump demonstrated great strategic foresight and stellar statesmanship through robust diplomatic engagement with both Islamabad and New Delhi, which de-escalated a rapidly deteriorating situation,” Islamabad said in a statement posted on X.

“This intervention stands as a testament to his role as a genuine peacemaker and his commitment to conflict resolution through dialogue.”

Governments can nominate people for the Nobel Peace Prize. There was no immediate response from Washington, DC, or New Delhi.

Some analysts in Pakistan said the move might persuade Trump to think again about potentially joining Israel in striking Iran’s nuclear facilities. Pakistan has condemned Israel’s action as a violation of international law and a threat to regional stability.

In a social media post on Friday, Trump gave a long list of conflicts he said he had resolved, including India and Pakistan and the so-called Abraham Accords in his first term between Israel and some Muslim-majority countries. He added: “I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize no matter what I do.”

Pandering to Trump’s ‘ego’?

Trump has repeatedly said that he is willing to mediate between India and Pakistan over the disputed Kashmir region, their main source of enmity. Islamabad, which has long called for international attention to Kashmir, is delighted.

But his stance has upended US policy in South Asia, which had favoured India as a counterweight to China, and put in question previously close relations between Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Pakistan’s move to nominate Trump came in the same week its army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, met the US president for lunch. It was the first time that a Pakistani military leader had been invited to the White House when a civilian government was in place in Islamabad.

Trump’s planned meeting with Modi at the G7 summit in Canada last week did not take place after the US president left early, but the two later spoke by phone, in which Modi said “India does not and will never accept mediation” in its dispute with Pakistan, according to the Indian government.

Mushahid Hussain, a former chair of the Senate Defence Committee in Pakistan’s parliament, suggested nominating Trump for the peace prize was justified.

“Trump is good for Pakistan,” he said. “If this panders to Trump’s ego, so be it. All the European leaders have been sucking up to him big time.”

But the move was not universally applauded in Pakistan, where Trump’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza has inflamed passions.

“Israel’s sugar daddy in Gaza and cheerleader of its attacks on Iran isn’t a candidate for any prize,” said Talat Hussain, a prominent Pakistani television political talk show host, in a post on X.

“And what if he starts to kiss Modi on both cheeks again after a few months?”