Previous winners also include the World Food Program, female education activist and Taliban attack survivor Malala Yousafzai, ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, civil rights hero Martin Luther King Jr., and four former U.S. Presidents: Barack Obama, Jimmy Carter, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.
The coveted prize comes with an 18-karat gold medal and cash winnings of 10 million Swedish krona ($898,534), as well as international acclaim.
The decision of who to award the prize is a highly secretive operation, involving a rigorous eight-month process in which the Norwegian Nobel Committee and a host of Norwegian and international advisors screen names of nominees submitted by academics and statespeople all over the world.
A list of candidates is created by spring, with the committee making a simple majority vote at the start of October, according to the award’s website. The full list of nominees is not released for another 50 years, according to the prize’s website.
But historic winners do not always retain international favor; Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed was awarded the prize in 2019 for ending a 20-year conflict with neighboring Eritrea, but his reputation has since been tarnished for his role in the government blockade of Tigray, which has produced famine in the northern region, which is fighting an ongoing war of independence.
The peace prize caps a week of Nobel awards.
French author Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in Literature Thursday. Ernaux, who has written about class, sex and abortion, strongly defended women’s rights to contraception and abortion in a speech at a news conference in Paris.
“I will fight to my last breath so that women can choose to be a mother, or not to be. It’s a fundamental right,” she said.
The Nobel Committee also awarded prizes in Physics to scientists Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger for their work to develop new telecommunications systems that are impossible to break into. In Chemistry, Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless were the winners, for their work in developing a way of “snapping molecules together” that can be used to explore cells, map DNA and design drugs that can target diseases such as cancer more precisely.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
