Nobel Prize 2026 announcements start on Monday

The 2026 Nobel Prize announcements are scheduled to begin on October 5 with the medicine prize and continue through October 12.

The prizes have been awarded since 1901 to people and organisations whose work is judged to have advanced humanity, in line with the wishes of inventor Alfred Nobel.

Five Nobel Peace Prize laureates have been prevented from attending the Oslo awards ceremony since 1901. They include German journalist and pacifist Carl von Ossietzky in 1936, Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi in 1991, Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo in 2010, Belarusian human rights campaigner Ales Bialiatski in 2022 and Iranian activist Narges Mohammadi in 2023.

Malala Yousafzai became the youngest Nobel laureate in 2014, when she won at age 17. American John Goodenough became the oldest in 2019, winning the chemistry prize at age 97.

Since 1974, Nobel Foundation rules have barred posthumous awards, although a prize can still be awarded if the winner dies between the announcement and the formal ceremony. The foundation made an exception in 2011 after the medicine committee selected Ralph Steinman without knowing he had died three days earlier.

Women have received 68 of the 633 Nobel prizes awarded since 1901, about 10 percent. Marie Curie was the first woman laureate in 1903 and remains the only woman to have received two Nobel prizes.

Alfred Nobel is best known as the inventor of dynamite, but he also wrote poetry and, in the year of his death in 1896, wrote a four-act tragedy titled “Nemesis.”