The Nobel Prize: History, Categories, Selection and Indian Laureates

Alfred Nobel was a Swedish chemist, engineer and businessman. He made a huge fortune from explosives. Yet he is remembered today for a prize that honours peace and learning.

• He was born on 21 October 1833 in Stockholm, Sweden.
• He invented dynamite in 1866 and patented it in 1867 (NobelPrize.org).
• He held 355 patents in his lifetime.
• In 1894 he bought Bofors, a Swedish iron and arms company.
• He died on 10 December 1896 in Sanremo, Italy.

A popular story says a French paper once printed his obituary by mistake. It called him a “merchant of death”. Some say this made him think about his legacy. The story is often told, but it cannot be proved. Exams test the facts in the list above, not this story.

Nobel thought hard about what should happen to his money. On 27 November 1895, he signed his last will at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris.

• Most of his fortune was to be put into safe securities, forming a fund.
• The yearly income would go as prizes to those who gave the “greatest benefit to humankind”.
• The income was split into five equal parts: physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace.
• The will said the nationality of a candidate must not matter (Full text of the will).

To carry out the will, the Nobel Foundation was set up in 1900. It is a private body. It manages the money but does not choose the winners. The first prizes were given in 1901.

Today there are six prizes. Five come from the will. The sixth came much later, from a bank. Each prize has its own judge. This table is a favourite of exam setters.

Why is the Peace Prize given in Norway?

The will itself said so. It gave the peace prize to a committee of five chosen by the Storting, Norway’s parliament. So the Peace Prize is presented in Oslo (Wikipedia).

Is the economics prize a “real” Nobel?

• Its full name is the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
• Sweden’s central bank, the Riksbank, set it up in 1968.
• The bank still pays for it. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences picks the winners.
• The first winners, in 1969, were Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen (NobelPrize.org).

So it is not in Nobel’s will. But it is handed out with the other prizes, under the same rules.

The prize has a few firm rules. Each one has turned into an exam question at some point.

• Three at most: one prize can be shared by up to three people.
• Groups allowed for Peace: the Peace Prize can also go to an organisation.
• No self-nomination: nobody can propose their own name.
• Secret for 50 years: nomination records stay sealed for 50 years (NobelPrize.org).
• No posthumous prizes since 1974: a dead person cannot win, unless they die after the announcement.
• Prize money: for 2026 it is SEK 12.0 million per full prize (NobelPrize.org).

Before 1974, only two people won after death. They were Dag Hammarskjöld (Peace, 1961) and Erik Axel Karlfeldt (Literature, 1931).

Over 125 years, the prize has built up a set of famous records. These are the ones that keep coming back in exams (Nobel Prize facts).

• Youngest: Malala Yousafzai, Peace 2014, at age 17.
• Oldest: John B. Goodenough, Chemistry 2019, at age 97.
• Two different sciences: Marie Curie, Physics 1903 and Chemistry 1911.
• Two unshared prizes: Linus Pauling, Chemistry 1954 and Peace 1962. He is the only one.
• Three wins: the International Committee of the Red Cross, Peace 1917, 1944 and 1963.
• Said no: Jean-Paul Sartre (Literature 1964) and Le Duc Tho (Peace 1973) declined.

The very first Peace Prize, in 1901, went to Henry Dunant. He founded the Red Cross. He shared it with the French peace campaigner Frédéric Passy.

Mahatma Gandhi is the world’s best-known symbol of non-violence. Yet he never won the Peace Prize. He was not ignored, though.

• He was nominated in 1937, 1938, 1939, 1947 and 1948.
• The last nomination came a few days before he was killed in January 1948.
• Later members of the Nobel Committee have said in public that they regret this.
• When the Dalai Lama won in 1989, the committee chair said it was partly a tribute to Gandhi (NobelPrize.org).

India’s Nobel story begins with a poet. It runs through physics, medicine, economics and peace. Keep the years in order. Exams often ask “who was first?”

Indian citizens who won

• 1913, Literature: Rabindranath Tagore. He was the first Indian and first non-European to win in literature. The prize is linked with Gitanjali (Song Offerings).
• 1930, Physics: C.V. Raman, for his work on the scattering of light. The effect is named the Raman effect.
• 1979, Peace: Mother Teresa, “for bringing help to suffering humanity”. She worked in Kolkata.
• 1998, Economics: Amartya Sen, for his work on welfare economics.
• 2014, Peace: Kailash Satyarthi, shared with Malala Yousafzai, for children’s rights (Wikipedia).

Indian-born or Indian-origin winners

• 1968, Medicine: Har Gobind Khorana, for reading the genetic code. He was born in Raipur, Punjab, now in Pakistan.
• 1983, Physics: Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, for his work on how stars grow and die. He was born in Lahore.
• 2009, Chemistry: Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, for studies of the ribosome.
• 2019, Economics: Abhijit Banerjee, with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer, for testing ways to fight poverty.

Other India links

• Ronald Ross, Medicine 1902, for his work on malaria. He was born in Almora.
• Rudyard Kipling, Literature 1907, was born in Bombay.
• The 14th Dalai Lama, Peace 1989, lives in India (NobelPrize.org).

One more fact links Tagore to history. He gave up his British knighthood after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919.

The 2026 prizes are being announced in October 2026. Medicine came first, on 5 October.

• The 2026 Medicine prize went to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel.
• They won for light-gated ion channels and optogenetics.
• Optogenetics lets scientists switch nerve cells on and off with light.
• The light switch is a protein called channelrhodopsin. It came from Chlamydomonas, a single-celled alga (Nobel press release).