Beyond the Ceremony: Surprising Stories of Nobel Prize Winners
Every year, the world looks forward to the Nobel Prize announcements. These famous awards honor individuals and groups for major steps forward for humanity. Inventor Alfred Nobel created the prizes, which have been given out since 1901. Many interesting stories lie behind the winners and the awards themselves.
Some Nobel laureates could not attend their award ceremonies. In 1936, German journalist Carl von Ossietzky was held in a Nazi camp. Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi was under house arrest in 1991. She did not attend, fearing she might not return home.
In 2010, China’s Liu Xiaobo was in prison. His prize chair remained empty. Belarusian Ales Bialiatski was also in jail in 2022. His wife accepted the award for him. In 2023, Iranian activist Narges Mohammadi was in Evin prison.
The Nobel Prizes have honored both very young and very old people. Malala Yousafzai from Pakistan was the youngest winner. She received the Peace Prize in 2014 at age 17. Australia’s Lawrence Bragg won a Physics Prize in 1915 at 25. Nadia Murad, an Iraqi activist, won the Peace Prize at 25 in 2018.
American John Goodenough was the oldest laureate. He won the Chemistry Prize in 2019 at 97. He worked on lithium-ion batteries for phones. The year before, Arthur Ashkin won the Physics Prize at 96.
Since 1974, the Nobel Prize is not given after a person dies. However, if a winner dies between the October announcement and the December ceremony, they still receive it. Before 1974, only two people won posthumously. Dag Hammarskjold, a UN leader, received the Peace Prize in 1961 after dying in a plane crash. Swedish poet Erik Axel Karlfeldt won the Literature Prize in 1931 after his death. In 2011, Ralph Steinman won the Medicine Prize. The committee did not know he had died three days earlier. He still received the award.
Women have won only 68 of the 633 Nobel Prizes since 1901. This is about 10 percent of all awards. Fewer women have won in science fields. Marie Curie was the first woman winner in 1903. She is the only woman to win two Nobel Prizes: in Physics and Chemistry.
Alfred Nobel, the prize founder, was also a writer. He invented dynamite, but he loved English poetry. He wrote poems in Swedish and English throughout his life. He once wrote that he used poetry to feel better and improve his English. Nobel once thought physics was his only talent, not writing.
