Amendments to reduce celebrations, dinners, and the delivery of prizes
Coronavirus imposes new arrangements for Nobel prizes
Each award will reach $ 1.1 million this year.
A.F.B.
The Nobel Prizes will be awarded this year, despite the special challenge that the Corona pandemic poses to the organizers and awarding bodies.
"We were worried that we wouldn't even be able to pick any winners this year," said CEO of the Nobel Foundation, Lars Heikenstein.
The foundation manages the origins of the Swedish industrialist and inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel, who had the idea of awarding prizes in the fields of literature, medicine, physics, chemistry and peace.
"We are defending knowledge, science and peace, and these are matters that may be of particular importance these days," he said.
The winners of the Nobel prizes this year will get more money, and the foundation said that the value of each prize will reach 10 million kronor (1.1 million dollars), compared to 9 million kronor during the past years.
The pandemic has led to the imposition of some amendments to the famous prizes, as the award ceremonies scheduled for December 10 in Oslo and Stockholm have been reduced due to the pandemic, and dinner banquets for award winners have been canceled, and the winners in the fields of medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and economics will receive their prizes in their countries And not in Stockholm.
A limited number of guests will be invited to the Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony in Oslo, although it is not yet clear if the winners will attend.
The Nobel Prize week begins, like previous years, with the announcement of the Nobel Prize winner in medicine on Monday, the fifth of October, followed by the Nobel Prize in Physics on the sixth, then Chemistry on the seventh, Literature on the eighth, and Peace on the ninth of this month.
The Nobel Prize in Economics, which is not one of the original Nobel Prizes, will be announced on the 12th of this month.
Last year, the Swedish Academy announced two Nobel Prize winners for literature, the Polish author Oliga Tokarczuk for 2018 and the Austrian author Peter Handke for 2019, after the announcement of the award was postponed in 2018 due to a scandal related to sexual assault and conflict of interest.
The Swedish Academy reported that this year 197 candidates are competing for the Nobel Prize for Literature, of whom 37 have not been nominated before.
It is difficult to guess who will win the award because the Academy does not publish a short list of nominees, and among the previous personalities who represented the prize as a surprise, was the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, in 2016. It is noteworthy that the nominations and consultations related to all the Nobel prizes are secret for 50 years.
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