Nobel prizes starts with physiology or medicine prize

STOCKHOLM: The winners of this year's Nobel Prizes are to be announced over the next week, to include two literature laureates and the coveted Nobel Peace Prize.

Events begin Monday with the award for physiology or medicine. The physics prize is handed out Tuesday and the following day is the chemistry prize.

This year's double-header Literature Prizes will be awarded Thursday and the Peace Prize will be announced on Friday.

The economics prize will be awarded on Oct. 14.

The 2018 literature prize was suspended after a scandal rocked the Swedish Academy. The body plans to award it this year, along with announcing the 2019 laureate.

Prize founder Alfred Nobel — a Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite — decided the physics, chemistry, medicine and literature prizes should be awarded in Stockholm and the peace prize in Oslo.

He specifically designated the institutions responsible for the prizes: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awards the Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry; the Karolinska Institutet is responsible for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine; the Swedish Academy picks the Nobel Prize in Literature, and a committee of five people elected by the Norwegian Parliament decides who wins the Nobel Peace Prize.

Nobel's exact reasons for having an institution in Norway handing out the peace prize is unclear but during his lifetime Sweden and Norway were joined in a union, which was dissolved in 1905.

The economics prize — officially known as the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel — wasn't created by Nobel, but by Riksbanken, Sweden's central bank, in 1968. It is the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences that was tasked with selecting the winner.

Nobel glory this year comes with a 9-million kronor ($918,000) cash award, a gold medal and a diploma. The laureates receive them at elegant ceremonies in Stockholm and Oslo on Dec. 10 — the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.