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This year’s Nobel Prize season is approaching as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupts decades of nearly uninterrupted peace in Europe and increases the risk of a nuclear catastrophe.
The mysterious Nobel committee has never hinted at who will win prizes in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature, economics or peace. It’s anyone’s guess who might win the awards, which will be announced from Monday.
However, winning the world’s most prestigious award has no shortage of pressing reasons to watch: wars in Ukraine and Ethiopia, disruptions to energy and food supplies, rising inequality, the climate crisis, the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Science awards reward complex achievements beyond the comprehension of most people. But winners of the Peace and Literature Prize are often well known to global audiences, and those choices — or perceived omissions — can sometimes provoke emotional responses.
MEPs have called on this year’s Nobel Peace Prize committee to recognize the resistance of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainian people to the Russian aggression.
Dan Smith, director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, said that while the desire was understandable, the choice was unlikely because the Nobel committee has traditionally honored figures who ended conflicts, not wartime leaders.
Smith believes the candidates for the Peace Prize are more likely to be those fighting climate change or the International Atomic Energy Agency, a past winner. Smith said once again the IAEA would recognize its efforts to prevent a radiological disaster at the Russian-occupied Zaporozhye nuclear power plant at the heart of Ukraine’s battle, as well as its work in combating nuclear proliferation.
“This is a really difficult time in world history, and not much peace has been achieved,” he said.
Promoting peace doesn’t always get Nobel Prizes. India’s Mohandas Gandhi, the preeminent symbol of non-violence, has never been more revered.
In some cases, the recipients did not live out the values ​​enshrined in the Peace Prize.
Just this week, the Vatican admitted to disciplinary action against Nobel Peace Laureate Bishop Carlos Siménez Bello, accused of sexually abusing boys in East Timor in the 1990s.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed won peace with neighboring Eritrea in 2019. A year later, a major ethnic conflict broke out in the country’s Tigray region. Some have accused Abiy of escalating tensions, leading to widespread atrocities. Critics have called for his Nobel Prize to be withdrawn, and the Nobel committee has issued a rare warning to him.
Myanmar activist Aung San Suu Kyi won in 1991 for opposing military rule, but decades later was seen as failing to oppose atrocities against the predominantly Muslim Rohingya minority.
In some years, the Peace Prize is not awarded. It suspended them during World War I, except for a tribute to the ICRC in 1917. Due to World War II, it did not distribute anything between 1939 and 1943. In 1948, the year Gandhi died, the Norwegian Nobel Committee did not award any prizes, citing a lack of suitable living candidates.
Peace prizes don’t always offer protection, either.
Last year, journalists Maria Ressa of the Philippines and Dmitry Muratov of Russia won awards for “bravely fighting for freedom of speech” in the face of authoritarian governments.
After the invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin cracked down on independent media, including the New Gazette of Muratov, Russia’s most prominent independent newspaper. Muratov himself was attacked on a Russian train by an attacker who poured red paint on him, injuring his eyes.
The Philippine government ordered the shutdown of Ressa’s news agency Rappler this year.
Meanwhile, literary awards are notoriously unpredictable.
Few bets on last year’s winner, Zanzibar-born British author Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose book explores the impact of colonialism and immigration on individuals and societies.
Gurner is only the sixth African-born winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, which has long been criticized for focusing too much on European and North American writers. It is also dominated by men, with only 16 women out of 118 winners.
An obvious contender is Salman Rushdie, an Indian-born author and free speech advocate whose death the civilian ruler in Iran has called for his death for his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses. Afterwards, he went into hiding for many years. In August, Rushdie, 75, was stabbed and seriously injured at a festival in New York state.
The list of potential winners includes literary giants from around the world: Kenyan author Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Japan’s Haruki Murakami, Norway’s Jon Fosse, Antigua-born Jamaican Kincaid and France’s Annie Ernaux.
The 2021 Gurnah and 2020 awards for American poet Louise Glück have helped lift the literary prize from years of controversy and scandal.
In 2018, the award was delayed after allegations of sexual abuse rocked the Swedish Academy that named the Nobel Committee on Literature and sparked an exodus of members. The academy has reinvented itself but faced more criticism for awarding the 2019 literary prize to Peter Handke of Austria, known as a Serbian war crimes apologist.
Some scientists want the Physiology or Medicine Prize to recognize colleagues who were instrumental in developing the mRNA technology for a COVID-19 vaccine that has saved millions of lives around the world.
“When we think of the Nobel Prize, we think of a paradigm shift, and in a way, I think the mRNA vaccine and its success with COVID-19 was the turning point for us,” said Deborah Raj, a professor of microbiology at the university. Deborah Fuller said Washington’s.
Physics can sometimes seem obscure and incomprehensible to the public. But in the past three years, the Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to easier-to-understand topics: computer models of climate change, black holes and planets beyond our solar system.
Some of the harder-to-understand topics in physics — like stopping light, quantum physics, and carbon nanotubes — could win a Nobel Prize this year.
The announcement of the Nobel Prizes will kick off Monday with a prize in physiology or medicine, followed by physics on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on October 7, and the Economics Prize will be announced on October 10.
A cash prize of SEK 10 million (nearly $900,000) will be awarded on December 10.
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