With the Nobel Prizes, which have been awarded since 1901, it is extremely rare that winners are unable to receive their awards in person. Five Nobel Peace Prize winners in the history of the prize were denied this because they were imprisoned in their home countries at the time of their award.
They included the German journalist Carl von Ossietzky in 1935, the Myanmar politician Aung San Suu Kyi in 1991, the Chinese human rights activist Liu Xiaobo in 2010 and, most recently, the Belarusian lawyer Ales Bjaljazki in 2022 and the Iranian human rights activist Narges Mohammadi in 2023.
In 1973, the Vietnamese politician Le Duc Tho was the only Nobel Peace Prize winner to date to voluntarily reject the prize awarded to him. At the time, he was honored together with US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and justified his rejection of the prize by saying that there was still no peace in Vietnam.
The Nobel Peace Prize is traditionally presented on December 10th in Oslo City Hall – the ceremony takes place today at 1 p.m. On the same day, the anniversary of the death of dynamite inventor and prize founder Alfred Nobel (1833-1896), all other Nobel Prizes in the other categories of medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and economics will be presented in Stockholm. This year, the prizes are worth eleven million Swedish crowns (around one million euros) per category.
