A week of Nobel Prizes opens on Monday with the award for medicine or physiology and culminates on Friday with the prestigious peace prize after months of secret deliberations.
The date for the announcement of the Nobel Prize in literature has not been set in line with tradition, but it is always on a Thursday and in recent years has been included in the same week as the other awards.
The prizes, each worth 10-million kronor ($1-million) this year, are always surrounded by speculation since award committees make their decisions in deep secrecy and candidates are not publicly revealed for 50 years.
Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist and inventor of dynamite, left only vague guidelines in his will establishing the prizes, which were first awarded in 1901 and celebrated their centennial last year.
For the first prize being announced on Monday, he simply stated the winner ”shall have made the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or medicine.”
The winners of the prizes for physics will be announced on Tuesday and for chemistry and economics — the only one established separately from Nobel’s will — on Wednesday in Stockholm. The peace prize is to be announced on Friday in Oslo, Norway.
The 18 lifetime members of the Swedish Academy that choose the literature laureate make their final decision at one of their weekly Thursday meetings, only setting the date early in the same week to keep the world guessing.
Kaj Schueler, a literary editor at Swedish daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, speculated that the academy’s choice would be a surprise since last year’s award went to perennial favorite VS Naipaul.
”I also think it’s time for them to pick a poet,” Schueler said, declining to single out any names. ”The last poet they had was the Polish writer Wislawa Szymborska in 1996.” Since then playwrights and prose writers have won the coveted prize. The only public hints available are for the peace prize. The five-member awards committee never reveals the candidates, but sometimes those making the nominations announce their choices.
With the world still reeling from last year’s September 11 attacks and concerned about US plans for a war in Iraq, no clear favorites have emerged. Among the nominees were Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who has sought to unify his country after the hard-line Taliban was ousted by US-led air strikes, former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the Salvation Army and the US Peace Corps.
US President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were nominated for leading the war against terrorism but were seen as unlikely winners in the wake of their efforts to convince the world of the need to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
The Nobel Assembly at the world-renowned Karolinska Institute, which selects the medicine prize winner, invites nominations from previous recipients, professors of medicine and other professionals worldwide before whittling down its choices in the fall. Last year’s winners were Leland Hartwell of the United States and Timothy Hunt and Paul Nurse from Britain for discovering key regulators of the process that lets cells divide, which is expected to lead to new cancer treatments.
The awards always are presented on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death in 1896. – Sapa-AP