Now it’s time for the hundredth Nobel Prize awards. This years Nobel Prize winners were announced by the second week of October. The literature prize was won by the Trinidad writer Vidiadhar Surajprasou Naipaul. This prize is seen as the most prestigious and honourable prize of the six there is. Besides the literature prize there are the Peace Prize, chemistry, economics, physics and physiology/medicine prizes.

The Nobel prizes were first awarded in 1901, five years after the Swedish chemist and inventor Alfred Nobel died. He left a great fortune behind and directed in his will that the income from his estate should be used to fund five annual prizes. Chemistry, the peace prize, physics, physiology or medicine and literature. The sixth prize which wasn’t in Alfred Nobel’s will is the economic science prize and it was first awarded in 1969. The economic science prize was established by the Bank of Sweden when they celebrated 300-years anniversary in memory of Alfred Nobel. The Nobel foundation accepted the prize and the academy of science said that they could choose the prize winners, while the Bank of Sweden promised each year to contribute with the same amount of money like the other prizes.

How the winners are chosen

The Royal Swedish Academy of science chooses the physics, chemistry and economics winners. The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm awards the prizes for medicine. The Swedish Academy in Stockholm awards the prize for literature and finally the winner of the Peace Prize is elected by The Norwegian Nobel Committee. The prize-winners are chosen after a long and laborious procedure. The people who can decide the nominees are members of the administration assembly, professors in the mentioned subjects, especially invited people in Swedish and foreign universities, learned society, and past winners in the subject; in the literature prize the chairmen in writing organisations can cast their vote too. The prizes are handed out in Stockholm the 10:th of December because that was the day that Nobel died and then a lot of people are gathered to see the king of Sweden hand out the Nobel Prizes. But not all prizes are handed out in Stockholm. The Peace Prize is handed out in Oslo.

The winners of the prizes this year

The winner of the literature prize this year is V.S. Naipaul who comes from Trinidad but has his roots in India. He has written many books and the academy gave this prize to him on the grounds was that "having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories" The winners of the economy prize this year are George A. Akerlof, A. Michael Spence and Joseph E. Stiglitz "for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information" The winners of the medicine prize are Leland H. Hartwell, R. Timothy (Tim) Hunt and Sir Paul M. Nurse "for their discoveries of key regulators of the cell cycle". The winners of the chemistry prize are William S. Knowles, Ryoji Noyori and K. Barry Sharpless "for their work on chirally catalysed hydrogenation reactions" This year’s winners in the physics category are Eric A. Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle and Carl E. Wieman "for the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms, and for early fundamental studies of the properties of the condensates" The sixth prize this year is the Peace Prize. This year the prize is shared by the United Nations and the U.N. secretary-general Kofi Annan.

Alfred Nobel

So who is the man behind this glamorous prize? Alfred Nobel was born in Sweden in 1833. Alfred was a great chemist who among other things invented the dynamite. Because of his chemistry skills he became a very wealthy man. Along with his attempts to invent the dynamite came a lot accidents and for a number of years the people considered Nobel almost a public enemy. He once accidentally killed one of his brothers in an accident .

Alfred Nobel’s will

Alfred Nobel’s will was four pages long and it said for instance that his money shall form a fund which interest shall be handed out as a reward to them, that under the past year have done humanity the greatest benefit. It also was written that you could win the Nobel prize regardless of nationality. So if you where from China or Sweden it didn’t matter because the one that have made the biggest progress for mankind is the one that should have the prize. Alfred was a very friendly man that were against war so that was a reason that it didn’t matter what kind of nationality you got.