US President Donald Trump campaigned hard for the Nobel Peace Prize last year, and as a result the Nobel committee is taking a very cautious approach to choosing this year’s winner. Winners in the various categories will be announced from next week.
Trump did not win last year, though Venezuela’s María Corina Machado gave him her medal. But the five-member Nobel committee came under pressure from his public demands before the announcement, and the US president is watching the jury’s work again this year.
“There is always a great deal of lobbying, and perhaps ultimately even attempts to put pressure on the committee. So in a way we are quite used to it,” Kristian Berg Harpviken, secretary of the Nobel committee, told AFP.
Who is in contention for peace
The peace prize will be announced on October 9. The Nobel authorities keep nominations and the jury’s deliberations secret for 50 years. Some experts believe that after the Trump episode, the committee may choose someone with broad consensus. After last year’s events, the committee is looking for ways to keep things less controversial, Haakon Gjerlow, acting director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo, told AFP.
Gjerlow’s favourites include Save the Children and Ukrainian children’s rights activist Mykola Kuleba, who campaigns to bring back Ukrainian children taken illegally from occupied territories to Russia. He thinks the organisation and Kuleba could share the prize. That choice might please Trump’s wife, Melania, who wrote to Russian President Vladimir Putin last year appealing for the release of Ukrainian children.
Gjerlow’s list of possible winners also includes Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms (ERR), a vast network of volunteers who risk their lives to help people facing war and hunger, as well as the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), after a bad year for journalists, and the International Space Station (ISS).
But if the committee wants to clash directly with Trump, it could choose someone else, such as Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, the International Criminal Court (ICC) or Pope Leo XIV.
Will literature go to Argentina?
The literature prize, announced on October 8 and chosen by the Swedish Academy, is always a focus of interest. Last year it went to Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai. Literary critics consulted by AFP think the academy may choose a woman, possibly from Latin America.
Latin American literature has been much discussed in recent years, and after male writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, women are leading this new wave, said Lina Kalmteg, literary critic at Swedish public radio SR. Their writing often has a feminist touch and mixes violence, darkness and surrealism, she said, adding that 48-year-old Argentine writer Samanta Schweblin could be a surprise name this year.
The prize is usually awarded for a writer’s body of work rather than a single book. Critics’ lists also include Antiguan-American writer Jamaica Kincaid and Chinese writer Can Xue, whose work explores exile, identity and the trauma of colonialism, along with regular names such as Australia’s Gerald Murnane and Alexis Wright, American Thomas Pynchon and Mexico’s Cristina Rivera Garza.
When the prizes are announced
The Nobel season opens with the medicine prize on Monday (October 5). Experts say it could go to research on the hormone GLP-1, which regulates appetite and underpins weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic. Physics follows on October 6, chemistry on October 7, and economics on October 13. Each prize comprises a diploma, a gold medal and a cheque for about $1.2 million, shared when there are several winners.
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