The Nobel Prizes, which will be awarded starting this Monday, could shed a ray of hope in a world threatened by the climate crisis and fractured by conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East.
The famous awards for Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, Literature, Peace and Economics will be awarded between October 7 and 14 in Stockholm and Oslo.
The Nobel Peace Prize, the most notable of the week, has never been so difficult to predict, with catastrophes multiplying throughout the planet. The prize, which like the rest – with the exception of Economics – was created by the famous Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel (1833-1896), will be awarded on October 11.
Dan Smith, director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri), favors a “white year”, that is, for the prize not to be awarded, as has already happened 19 times in its entire history, the last of them in 1972, in the middle of the Vietnam War.
“Perhaps it is time to say: ‘Yes, many people work very hard, but without results and we need more people and world leaders to wake up and realize that we are in an extremely dangerous situation,'” he told AFP.
“There are currently more than 50 armed conflicts around the world” and their “lethality (…) has increased considerably over the last two decades,” he added.
But in Oslo, this possibility, seen as an acknowledgment of failure, seems excluded.
​A candidate worthy of the award
This year, 286 candidates were submitted, although their names will be kept secret for 50 years and only the winner will be known.
In 2023, the Nobel Peace Prize will go to the Iranian women’s rights activist Narges Mohammadi, imprisoned in her country.
This year, many of the few publicly announced candidacies are related to the Middle East, reflecting current events.
The UN Refugee Agency (UNRWA) and the Palestinian human rights organizations Al Haq and Israeli B’Tselam have also been proposed, without necessarily making them favorites.
Given the risk that weapons systems capable of operating autonomously – without human control – represent to humanity, several awards experts also cite the NGO coalition Stop Killer Robots as a possible winner.
Surprise for literature?
The Nobel Prize in Literature, another emblematic award that will be awarded on October 10, is like every year the subject of speculation.
The Chinese avant-garde author Can Xue, often compared to Kafka for the unreal and gloomy atmosphere that permeates her novels and short stories, is frequently cited by literary critics.
His name tops the betting sites. His experimental style oscillates between utopia and dystopia and transforms the mundane into the surreal.
“I think it will be a woman from a non-European linguistic region,” Bjorn Wiman, head of the culture section of the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, predicted for AFP.
The last Chinese awardee dates back to 2012, when the Swedish Academy honored Mo Yan.
This year, “the choice of the winner will go against the cultural elite,” predicted Wiman.
It is difficult to know how the 18 members of the Academy, which keep the Nobel candidate writers secret, decide.
Among literary circles, other common names move around, such as those of the Australian novelist Gerald Murnane; the British Salman Rushide; Antiguan-American writer Jamaica Kincaid; as well as that of the Canadian poet Anne Carson, the Hungarian Laszlo Krasznahorkai or the Japanese Haruki Murakami.
Last year, the award was presented to Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse.
one million dollars
The Nobel season will begin on Monday with the Medicine award. On Tuesday the Physics will be delivered and on Wednesday, the Chemistry one.
Research on the genetics of lipid metabolism is predicted for the Medicine Prize; studies on the basal ganglia – parts of the brain associated with the control of motor skills and emotions – and the discovery of genetic fingerprinting, which allowed us to better understand the development of mammals.
The 2023 edition rewarded the work of Hungarian researcher Katalin Kariko and her American colleague Drew Weissman for the development of vaccines based on messenger RNA, decisive in the fight against Covid-19.
The Nobel season will close with the Economics prize on Monday the 14th.
The winners will receive a check for 11 million crowns (more than one million dollars), which will be distributed if there are several winners.
