Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Save articles for later Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Got it Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size A phone rings in the White House, well after midnight on October 10, 2025. There’s somebody on the line with a foreign accent. Possibly Swedish, maybe Norwegian? They want to speak to the president. At first, it’s dismissed as a crank call. But then the penny drops. They’re put through. Donald Trump picks up, annoyed and bleary-eyed. “Yeah, who is this?” Oh. It’s the people from the Nobel Peace Prize. Mr President, they say you’re this year’s winner. He has 10 minutes to alert his family and staff before the news goes live to the world. Trump jolts upright, wide awake, elated. He’s been after this for years. Stranger things have happened. The Scandinavian-based organisation awarded the peace prize to Barack Obama in 2009, when he’d been in office for less than eight months. US President Barack Obama officially accepts the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. Credit: Getty/ digitally tinted US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger got his in 1973 for his efforts to end the war in Vietnam, never mind that behind the scenes he had orchestrated the illegal bombing of Laos and Cambodia and that the conflict would rage on for two more years (his North Vietnamese co-winner, Le Duc Tho, refused to accept the award). In its very first year – 1901 – the Nobel Foundation chose to give the prize for literature not to the Russian master Leo Tolstoy (who never won) but to a French poet called Sully Prudhomme (who? Indeed). Stephen Hawking never got one, nor did Mahatma Gandhi. Plenty of women should have won but didn’t. They happily gave the prize for medicine, though, in 1949, to the Portuguese neurologist Antonio Egas Moniz, for developing the frontal lobotomy as a cure for psychosis, one of medical science’s great missteps. Then there was Bob Dylan in 2016, the first musician to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The decision was seen as both an affront to conventional writers and entirely unnecessary, with his friend Leonard Cohen describing it as “like pinning a medal on Mount Everest for being the highest mountain”. (A shocked Dylan, for his part, was initially unreachable by the Nobel organisation for several days.)
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Trump hasn’t quite said outright that he wants the peace prize but he seems to think about it a lot. “They will never give me a Nobel Peace Prize,” he grumbled during a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office in February. “It’s too bad. I deserve it, but they will never give it to me.” The Economist subsequently quipped: “Repeated assurances from Mr Trump that he is not campaigning for the gong, nor thinks he will ever get it, are taken as sure signs he desperately wants it.” Is Trump really a contender? Who chooses who wins? What is the waiting game for many would-be recipients known as “Nobel lag”? What’s it like to win a Nobel? Although Trump, for now, can only dream of it, the unexpected phone call is no work of fiction. Many are the Nobel laureates who’ve picked up the receiver at some odd hour to be told their life is about to be turned upside down. Australian astrophysicist Brian Schmidt was – famously – halfway through preparing dinner when he got his call in 2011. Australian astrophysicist Brian Schmidt, who won a Nobel in 2011, pictured at the awards banquet with Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden. Credit: Getty/ digitally tinted After initially thinking it was a hoax by one of his students – he was based at the Australian National University’s Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics – he was convinced, by a Scandinavian voice, that it was real and that in eight minutes he would then be connected to a conference call with world media. It was both a surprise and not. He’d done the work, but over a decade earlier, leading a team of astronomers to the discovery that the universe’s expansion was continually accelerating, contrary to accepted wisdom. They posited the cause must be the mysterious effect of what they dubbed “dark energy” (which remains an enigma): a Nobel-worthy discovery. But with just one Nobel up for grabs each year for six categories (physics, chemistry, physiology/medicine, economics, literature, peace), the number of qualified contenders can bank up like buses during rush hour and the years passed by.
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Now the phone call had, finally, come out of the blue, letting Schmidt know that the work of he and his team had snared the biggest prize of all, shared with Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess from the University of California for their complementary research. “It’s quite a shock to the system,” Schmidt tells us. “You go from being a professor who doesn’t catch that much notice, [to] a person who gets lots of invites and opportunities to do lots and lots of things. But on the less good side, less time to do research.” My wife picks up the phone, and the guy says, ‘this is Nils Ringertz from the Nobel Committee’ Peter Doherty, another of just 15 Australians to have won a Nobel (for Physiology or Medicine, in 1996), was living in Memphis, Tennessee at the time when his phone call came at 4.30am. “We assumed one of our relatives in Australia was ill or something, and my wife picks up the phone, and the guy says, ‘this is Nils Ringertz from the Nobel Committee’. And she says, ‘this is for you. ’ The next call we get is from talkback radio in Bogota, Colombia, and then Reuters, and then The Sydney Morning Herald and so on. So you know it’s not fake.” The attention can be overwhelming. “Once it’s announced, all the journalists are waiting, because this is the one event that’s on the media calendar for science.” Peter Doherty shared his 1996 Nobel with fellow immunologist Rolf Zinkernagel. Credit: Getty/ digitally tinted Laureates have some obligations, including turning up to the awards ceremony (in Oslo for the peace prize, Stockholm for the others) on December 10 if at all possible (encouraged by business-class flights and a chauffeur on arrival), signing their Nobel diploma (a formal acceptance of their award), providing a biography and subsequently delivering a lecture about their work (though a reclusive Dylan avoided the ceremony and somehow fulfilled the speech obligation by having the United States Ambassador to Sweden, Azita Raji, read out something he’d written). Then there’s the numerous rounds of appearances, white-tie banquets with Scandinavian royalty (think nettle soup and tartar of marinated salmon with red pepper cream) and endless phone calls with journalists from their home countries (“where were you when you got the call? What are your hopes for humanity?” etc). For scientists at least, “The first year is extremely intense,” says Peter Doherty, who shared his Nobel with fellow immunologist Rolf Zinkernagel for demonstrating how the immune system recognises virus-ridden cells. “Everyone wants to get the latest Nobel Prize winner to talk to their institution.” Financially, the Nobel is not insignificant; each prize conferring around $1.7 million in prize money (11 million Swedish krona) and a handsome gold medal. The effect on a winner’s career, meanwhile, can vary from insignificant to profound, depending on the award and the stage of life at which they win. In literature, for example, it can introduce more obscure works to a global audience, such as the novels and plays of 2023 winner Jon Fosse, who writes in a written form of Norwegian called Nynorsk.
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Conversely, astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter tells us from the US, “It doesn’t actually make a huge difference when people already respect highly what you’re doing – and those people who [don’t], they’re just slightly more irritated because you also have a Nobel prize and they don’t.” He, Schmidt and Riess had already won the 2006 Shaw Prize for Astronomy (sometimes called the “Nobel of the East”, as it is awarded in Hong Kong) for their discovery; the actual Nobel came in 2011. If anything, he says, the gong might even put the brakes on your career. “Getting a Nobel prize tends to slightly diminish the desire to fund your new project, just because people feel like, oh, you already won a Nobel prize. You know, it’s somebody else’s turn.” Loading For Perlmutter, who hints that we’re on the brink of another major discovery about dark energy, the major benefit of the Nobel for him was how it opened doors – he was invited to sit on Joe Biden’s President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology – and helped him to spread the word about the value of science education. “It’s much easier to start conversations and to get things going if you’re wanting to work on something that’s interdisciplinary, or if you’re wanting to work on something that’s societal.” American activist Jody Williams, who shared the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for leading the international campaign to ban landmines, concurs. “It gave me a megaphone,” she tells us, “To call out the hypocrisies, injustices, and atrocities that continue around the world.” Jody Williams (centre) with fellow Nobel laureates Leymah Gbowee (left) Tawakkol Karman. Credit: Getty/ digitally tinted Yet for the Harvard economist Claudia Goldin, who won the economics Nobel in 2023 “for having advanced our understanding of women’s labor market outcomes”, life has mostly continued as before, though she did get asked onto NPR radio and threw the first pitch at a Red Sox-Yankees baseball game (a uniquely American honour). “My research, teaching, and advising continues unchanged,” she tells us. “I do no consulting or speaking for fees, so my life hasn’t changed in that manner, and I don’t travel to India, China, the Vatican, Brazil, Chile, or other exotic destinations. I do spend about 30 minutes a day responding to invitations and other requests. I probably also have more lectures in the local area and elsewhere because of the award. My opinion gets asked more now, but my opinions haven’t changed.” So, too, life goes on pretty much as usual for David Card, who won the economics Nobel in 2021 for his research into the minimum wage. “I won the prize the year before I planned to retire, so it did not lead to such a big change for me as for some of the other winners in my cohort, including my co-winners in economics,” he tells us. “For them, it was clearly a boost in their academic standing. Academia is very hierarchical and Nobel prizes count a lot. I did get a nice dedicated parking place on campus [at the University of California, Berkley]. I never had parking before because it’s very expensive and the lots are often full and unless it’s raining really hard I ride my bike.”
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How do the prizes work? The now-prestigious awards originated with Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist responsible for patenting an explosive he called “dynamite” in the late 1800s (from the Greek word dynamis, meaning power or strength). Nobel’s insight was to mix unpredictable nitroglycerine with a stabiliser, making it less likely to self-detonate. The invention revolutionised mining, canal-digging, road building and tunnelling – making them safer and cheaper – and made Nobel a fortune, along with less-celebrated forays into armaments and chemicals. Despite a long-term relationship with a much younger woman he met in a flower shop, Nobel never married or had children. Consequently, when he wrote his will, with no family to consider and likely some guilt about where his fortune had come from, he decided to fund annual prizes that would be given to those who had “conferred the greatest benefit to humankind”. Workers in Alfred Nobel’s dynamite factory, the source of his great fortune. Credit: Getty/ digitally tinted He named five fields of endeavour: the most important discovery or invention in the field of physics; the most important discovery or improvement in chemistry; the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or medicine (today colloquially known as the Nobel Prize for Medicine); the most outstanding work of literature “in an ideal direction”; and a prize for the person “who has done the most or best to advance fellowship among nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and the establishment and promotion of peace congresses” – the Nobel Peace Prize. Loading A body to administer the prizes was established in June 1900, the Nobel Foundation, with the first prizes handed out the following year, five years after Nobel’s death. Somewhat puzzlingly, Nobel had dictated that four of his five prizes (economics would be added later) be decided by Swedish institutions (the Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Karolinska Institute and the Swedish Academy, which chooses the prize for literature) but that the fifth, the prize for peace, be awarded by a committee of five selected by the parliament in neighbouring Norway, called the Norwegian Nobel Institute. Why he made this distinction is a mystery – he left no explanation. The Nobel organisation speculates he may have wanted to include Norway because it was at that time in a union with Sweden; he may have been influenced by the Norwegian parliament’s prominent role in resolving international disputes; and he was known to be a fan of Norwegian fiction – early “Scandi-noir”, perhaps.
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[SRC] https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/how-do-you-win-a-nobel-prize-20250902-p5mru3.html
