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Tanzanian author Abdulrazak Gurnah has won the 2021 Nobel Prize in literature, the award-giving body said. The prestigious prize was awarded on Thursday by the Swedish Academy, which cited Gurnah’s “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”. Born in Zanzibar and based in England, Gurnah recently retired as a professor of post-colonial literature at the University of Kent.
German Benjamin List and Scottish-born David MacMillan won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for developing new tools for building molecules that have helped make new drugs and are more environmentally friendly. Their work on asymmetric organocatalysis, which the award-giving body described as “a new and ingenious tool for molecule building”, has also helped in the development of plastics, perfumes and flavors.
Three scientists have been awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work to understand complex systems, such as the Earth’s climate. Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi were announced as the winners at an event in Stockholm. Research by Manabe and Hasselmann led to computer models of the Earth’s climate that can predict the impact of global warming.
The World Food Programme (WFP) has won the 2020 Nobel peace prize for its efforts to combat hunger and to improve conditions for peace in conflict areas. In its citation, the committee praised the WFP for its “efforts for combating hunger” and its “contribution to creating peace in conflicted-affected areas”. The agency acted “as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict”, it said.
The 2019 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed who made peace last year with bitter foe Eritrea. He was awarded the prize for his efforts to “achieve peace and international cooperation”. Mr Abiy’s peace deal with Eritrea ended a 20-year military stalemate following their 1998-2000 border war. He was named as the winner of the 100th Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo.
Canadian Donna Strickland was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics. Strickland is the first woman to take the prize in Physics in 55 years and just the third woman in history to be awarded the Physics prize. She shares the 2018 prize with American Arthur Askin and French Gerard Mourou. It recognizes their discoveries in the field of laser physics.
The 2018 Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to American James Allison and Japanese Tasuku Honjo. The pair’s research on how the body’s immune system can attack cancer cells was a ‘landmark in our fight against cancer’ according to the committee and ‘has fundamentally changed the way we view how cancer can be managed.’
Americans Harvey J. Alter and Charles M. Rice and British-born scientist Michael Houghton won the Nobel Prize for medicine on Monday for their discovery of the hepatitis C virus, a major source of liver disease that affects millions worldwide. Announcing the prize in Stockholm, the Nobel Committee noted that the trio’s work identified a major source of blood-borne hepatitis that couldn’t be explained by the previously discovered hepatitis A and B viruses.
One of the winners of this year’s Nobel Prize for economics says she hopes her achievement will inspire other women to take up the subject. Esther Duflo is only the second woman to win the prize – the first was Elinor Ostrom in 2009 – since it began in 1969. The 46-year-old is also the youngest person to win the prestigious award.
A Canadian-American cosmologist and two Swiss scientists won this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for their work in understanding how the universe has evolved from the Big Bang and the blockbuster discovery of the first known planet outside our solar system. On Monday, Americans William G. Kaelin Jr. and Gregg L. Semenza and Britain’s Peter J. Ratcliffe won the Nobel prize for Physiology or Medicine.