The 2026 Nobel winners will be announced between Oct 5 and 12, starting with the Nobel Prize in Medicine on Oct 5. (AFP photo)
Donald Trump’s intense campaigning last year for the Nobel Peace Prize has left the awarding committee treading carefully for this year’s pick, experts said ahead of next week’s prize announcement.
The U.S. president’s outspoken calls to be given the accolade put the five-member committee under unprecedented pressure last year.
The situation grew even more delicate when the laureate, Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, later gave Trump her Nobel gold medal, judging he deserved it after the capture of President Nicolas Maduro.
The Nobel jury knows it is being closely watched by the U.S. president again this year.
“There’s always a lot of lobbying, and ultimately perhaps also attempts to exert pressure on the committee,” the secretary of the Nobel committee, Kristian Berg Harpviken, told AFP in an interview.
“So in one sense we’re very used to that.”
According to several experts, the Trump saga could lead the committee to choose a laureate who enjoys broad consensus when the name is revealed on Oct. 9.
“After last year’s prize, maybe they’re seeking a less controversial situation this year,” the acting director of the Peace Research Institute of Oslo, Haakon Gjerlow, told AFP.
His favorite pick would be a joint prize to Save the Children and Mykola Kuleba, a Ukrainian children’s rights activist campaigning for the return of Ukrainian children illegally taken to Russia from occupied territories.
The other closely-watched Nobel is that for literature, to be announced on Oct. 8.
After honoring Hungarian author Laszlo Krasznahorkai last year, the Swedish Academy that selects the literature laureate could this time go for a woman writer, possibly from Latin America, according to some literary critics surveyed by AFP.
“In recent years, there has been a lot of talk about the ‘Latin American literary miracle’, this new generation that came after the male authors devoted to magical realism, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez,” said Lina Kalmteg, literary critic at Swedish public radio SR.
“In this new wave, it’s women who are taking the lead, with writing often tinged with feminism, but also often quite dark and violent, punctuated by surreal touches,” she noted.
