Credit: Catherine Delahaye via Getty Images
Nelson Mandela became a rallying point for South Africa’s oppressed, and the world’s most famous political prisoner. In 1993, Mandela was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, jointly with Frederik Willem de Klerk, for his work for the peaceful termination of the apartheid regime, and for laying the foundations for a new democratic South Africa.
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Nelson Mandela a few days after being released from prison in February 1990.
Photo by TREVOR SAMSON/AFP via Getty Images
Hundreds or thousands of nominations are received for the Nobel Prize every year from members of academies, university professors, scientists, previous Nobel Prize laureates, members of parliamentary assemblies and more.
The Nobel Prize medal.
© Nobel Prize Outreach. Photo: Clément Morin.
This year’s Nobel Prize announcements will take place 6–13 October. All announcements will be streamed live here on nobelprize.org.
Photo: Patrik Lundin/The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
Spanish violinist María Dueñas and Semyon Bychkov, chief conductor of the Czech Philharmonic, will perform at the Nobel Prize Concert on 8 December. The programme includes music by Modest Mussorgsky, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and Victoria Borisova-Ollas.
María Dueñas.
Photo: Felix Broede
This year’s laureates used tools from physics to construct methods that helped lay the foundation for today’s powerful machine learning.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 is about proteins, life’s ingenious chemical tools.
Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun discovered microRNA, a new class of tiny RNA molecules that play a crucial role in gene regulation.
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2024 is awarded to the South Korean author Han Kang, “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”
The grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, also known as Hibakusha, is receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again.
This year’s laureates have provided new insights into why there are such vast differences in prosperity between nations.
In the exhibition Fighting Disease – Three Stories From the Fields of Medicine, we meet a scientist, a doctor and a nurse who work to prevent disease, administer vaccines and search for new antibiotics.
This year’s Peace Prize exhibition tells the powerful story of Nihon Hidankyo and their work for a nuclear weapon-free world.
A large selection of artefacts from Nobel Prize laureates is on display.
Explore powerful moments and life-changing discoveries.
How much do you know about blood types? Try out in this game.
Learn about conditioned reflexes in this interactive game.
This fast-paced game relies on a keen knowledge of food containing vitamin B1.
Physicist Ivar Giaever died on 20 June 2025, aged 96. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 1973 “for their experimental discoveries regarding tunneling phenomena in semiconductors and superconductors, respectively”.
Physicist George E. Smith passed away on 28 May 2025, aged 95. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 2009 “for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor”.
Author Mario Vargas Llosa died on 13 April 2025 in Lima, Peru. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 2010 “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat”.
Sir J. Fraser Stoddart passed away on 30 December 2024, aged 82. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2016 “for the design and synthesis of molecular machines”.
