During the next week, the globe will celebrate peace and mankind’s do-gooders when the winners of the Nobel awards are disclosed in a stream of daily announcements, despite the fact that a war is now being fought in Ukraine.
Since World War II, there has not been a conflict fought between two countries that are so close to Stockholm and Oslo. These cities are the sites of the announcement of the prestigious Nobel Prizes in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature, and peace since 1901, and the Nobel Prize in Economics has been given out since 1969.
The announcement of the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize will take place on October 7 in Oslo, and according to the opinions of several specialists, the news will have a greater weight than usual this year. This will be the week’s most anticipated event.
This may be a good sign for the International Criminal Court, which is located in The Hague, or for the investigators who work for the investigative journalism organisation Bellingcat, which is headquartered in the Netherlands.
The nomination deadline for the Peace Prize was January 31, which was before Russia invaded Ukraine; but, the five members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee might offer their own selections at their first meeting of the year, which was conducted at the end of February after the invasion.
It is not known what names are on the list of nominations; however, it is known that 343 people or organisations have put their names up for consideration this year.
If it determines that there is no deserving candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has the option of not bestowing the award. The last time anything like it took place was fifty years ago.
Alexei Navalny, a critic of the Kremlin who is now serving time in prison, and Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the head of the opposition in Belarus, are also other potential candidates opposed to Putin.
The journalist Dmitry Muratov, another thorn in Putin’s side, was honoured in the cause of freedom of information in Russia in the same year that his colleague Maria Ressa from the Philippines received the same honour.
Experts believe that the anti-corruption organisation Transparency International and the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg are also potential candidates this year. Other environmental activists such as Nisreen Elsaim of Sudan, Chibeze Ezekiel of Ghana, and the tireless British campaigner David Attenborough could also be in the running.
According to literary experts questioned by AFP, Russian novelist and vocal opponent of Vladimir Putin Lyudmila Ulitskaya, who has been mentioned as a potential winner in prior years, may end up receiving the award given the present political climate.
Joan Didion from the United States, Hilary Mantel from the United Kingdom, and Javier Marias from Spain have all been mentioned in the past as potential winners. However, all three of these authors passed away within the past year, so they will not be succeeding Abdulrazak Gurnah from Tanzania as Nobel Laureate.
The Swedish Academy, which is in charge of choosing the recipient of the literary prize, has a history of highlighting writers who are not particularly well-known.
Following two prizes in a row that were given in this manner (in the year 2020, it was given to the American poet Louise Gluck), it is still unknown if it will pick a writer who is more mainstream this year.
Joyce Carol Oates, from the United States, Haruki Murakami, from Japan, as well as Michel Houellebecq and Annie Ernaux, both from France, are well-known writers who are often touted as potential award winners.
According to him and others, some of the potential winners include the Hungarian author Laszlo Krasznahorkai, the American authors Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, and the Norwegian dramatist Jon Fosse.
The Nobel Prize in Literature will be awarded on Thursday, the Nobel Prize in Peace will be awarded on Friday, and the Nobel Prize in Economics will be awarded on October 10; this prize is the only one that was not established in Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel’s will.
The therapy of breast cancer, developments in prenatal biopsies, and the creation of mRNA vaccines are among areas that are being considered as potential candidates for the Medicine Prize.
Potential winners in the fields of physics and chemistry include ground-breaking applications of light in the realm of physics, as well as the pioneers of “bioorthogonal” chemistry, which focuses on reactions in a living system that do not disrupt the biochemistry of the system. Each reward comes with a check for 10 million Swedish kronor, which is equivalent to $878,000. This money is meant to be split amongst many winners in a given field.