Nelson Mandela became a rallying point for South Africa’s oppressed, and the world’s most famous political prisoner. In 1993, Mandela was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, jointly with Frederik Willem de Klerk, for his work for the peaceful termination of the apartheid regime, and for laying the foundations for a new democratic South Africa.
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Nelson Mandela a few days after being released from prison in February 1990.
Photo by TREVOR SAMSON/AFP via Getty Images
She was met with mistrust and eventually forced to leave academia – but Katalin Karikó never lost focus, doubling-down on her work to harness mRNA for new vaccines and therapies. Karikó’s Nobel Prize-awarded discovery enabled the development of effective vaccines against COVID-19, offering protection to millions of people. Read her story.
Katalin Karikó in the research laboratory of the University of Pennsylvania, 2005.
© University of Szeged Klebelsberg Library
Credit: Getty Images
Kailash Satyarthi and the 2014 Nobel Prize laureates.
© Nobel Prize Outreach. Photo: Alexander Mahmoud
This year’s Nobel Prize announcements will take place on 5–12 October. All of the prize announcements will be broadcast live on the official digital channels of the Nobel Prize. In-depth information about the prizes will be published here at nobelprize.org.
The door to the Swedish Academy.
Photo: K. Svanholm.
The first design of the Nobel Center project is here – a public building in Stockholm, Sweden for science, literature and peace. It will be an international symbol of knowledge, focusing on the Nobel Prize laureates’ stories and groundbreaking achievements. Read more about the project.
View from the water along the quay. The Nobel Center consists of four interconnected volumes that relate to the buildings of Södermalm and the size and height of the buildings in Gamla stan, on the other side of the water. The choice to use a wooden frame and reclaimed bricks reduces the impact on the environment. Bricks have characterised the architecture of Stockholm for centuries. The red shade is found in Stockholm’s classic brick buildings, such as City Hall.
© Onirism/Nobel Prize Outreach
Susumu Tonegawa died on 11 July 2026, aged 86. He was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for his discovery of the genetic principle for generation of antibody diversity.”
François Englert passed away on 18 June 2026 in Uccle, Belgium, aged 93. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.”
Edmund Phelps died on 15 May 2026, aged 92. He was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2006 “for his analysis of intertemporal tradeoffs in macroeconomic policy.”
J. Michael Bishop passed away on 20 March 2026, aged 90. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1989 “for their discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes.”
