Greta Thunberg and Donald Trump candidates Nobel Peace Prize

Three hundred one candidates have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, including US President Donald Trump and Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. The Nobel Prize in Literature is also receiving a lot of attention this year.

Two Nobel Prizes for Literature will be announced on 10 October: those for the year 2018 and those for the year 2019. This has to do with the decision of the Swedish academy not to award a prize last year due to the scandal surrounding Jean-Claude Arnault. He was accused of sexual harassment and has since been convicted.

Arnault, the husband of academic Katarine Frostenson, was convicted for two rapes in December and lost the appeal he had filed earlier this year. In addition, the Swedish Academy had accused both Arnault and Fronstenson of prematurely telling the Nobel Prize winner and thereby violating their professional secrecy. Due to the dispute, no Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded in 2018. Frostenson left the academy early this year.

Since then, the Swedish Academy has had several new members, and the literary jury has been renewed to restore public confidence. The Nobel Prize for Literature will be awarded by a new committee over the next two years. Five people from the Swedish Academy will be added to that committee, supplemented by five external experts. This is a temporary solution, the Swedish Academy announced at the end of last year.

Candidates

The academy also announced that this year, there were 301 candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize. It concerns 223 people and 78 organizations. The best known are therefore Trump and Thunberg, but also, for example, the young peace activists Hajer Sharief from Libya, the Somali-Canadian Ilwad Elman, and Nathan Law Kwun-Chung from Hong Kong are often mentioned. Nominated organizations include Reporters without Borders and the Control Arms Coalition.

The prizes are traditionally awarded in the Swedish capital Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel. He is the inventor of the dynamite and also the driving force behind the Nobel Prizes.