Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Prize lecture, in which he first coined the term “Gulag Archipelago”, was smuggled out of the USSR on photographic film hidden in the back of a transistor radio. Read a firsthand account of this story from the cold war written by the courier himself. Solzhenitsyn didn’t arrive in Stockholm to receive the prize until four years later, after he had been expelled from the Soviet Union.

When asked about her most valuable words of advice, Nadine Gordimer, answered: “Boringly, I always repeat; read, read, read, and don’t read the book coming in a stream of words on a screen, don’t depend on that, which you now have in your car and on your, god knows, your cell phone and everything. Please, just go to the library and read.”

“An Ishiguro story is like a mix of Jane Austen and Franz Kafka. This may sound odd. Strictly speaking, it should be impossible. But Ishiguro shows that it works. It works well indeed.”
This is how Kasuo Ishiguro’s literature was described during the 2017 Nobel Prize award ceremony. Get a taster of his writing here.

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2020 was awarded with one half to Roger Penrose “for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity” and the other half jointly to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez “for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy”.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020 was awarded to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna “for the development of a method for genome editing”.

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2020 was awarded jointly to Harvey J. Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles M. Rice “for the discovery of Hepatitis C virus”.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2020 was awarded to the American poet Louise Glück “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”.

The Nobel Peace Prize 2020 was awarded to the World Food Programme (WFP) for its efforts to combat hunger, for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas and for acting as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict.

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2020 was awarded to Paul R. Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson “for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats”.

On 27 November 1895, Alfred Nobel signed his last will in Paris, France. The Swedish dynamite millionaire, who thought that his invention would end all wars, had now realised that it was a very deadly product. Wanting to make amends, he did what no man of such wealth had done before …

On 10 December 1901 the first Nobel Prizes were awarded, in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace. Read more about the first prizes.

Chemist, engineer and industrialist Alfred Nobel left 31 million SEK (today about 265 million dollar) to fund the Nobel Prizes. Read more about his life and work.