All six 2026 Nobel Prizes have been announced, naming ten laureates. Each prize carries SEK 12 million, which is divided when a prize is shared. The awards will be presented on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death.
The prizes reward different kinds of work. The science prizes honour discoveries or research methods, the literature prize honours a writer’s whole body of work, and the peace prize honours efforts to advance peace and international cooperation.
Medicine: controlling brain cells with light
Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel won for discoveries on light-gated ion channels and optogenetics. The method uses light to switch specially modified cells, including neurons, on or off.
Hegemann studied light-sensitive proteins in green algae. Nagel worked with him to characterise channelrhodopsin, a protein that opens in response to light and lets charged particles cross a cell membrane. Deisseroth and his collaborators showed how such proteins could be put into mammalian nerve cells to control them.
Researchers can now test which groups of neurons drive movement, sleep, memory, emotion or addiction. The method has also fed research on Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy and restoring limited vision. It is a research tool, not a routine treatment.
Physics: catching particles from space
Francis Halzen of the University of Wisconsin-Madison won for his decisive role in the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos from space. Neutrinos have no electric charge and almost never interact with matter, so they are very hard to detect.
IceCube places thousands of light sensors deep in the Antarctic ice. When a neutrino interacts nearby, it produces a faint blue flash that the sensors record. Halzen proposed the idea to the US National Science Foundation in 1999 and helped build the international team behind it. IceCube found evidence of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos in 2013. In 2017 it detected one from the direction of the active galaxy TXS 0506+056.
Chemistry: left hand, right hand
Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai won for discoveries on non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis. Some molecules exist in two mirror-image forms, like a left and right hand, and the two can behave differently in the body.
Kagan showed how a small imbalance in a catalyst’s mirror-image forms can produce a much larger one in the product. Soai demonstrated a reaction in which a product helps make more of itself, so a small preference for one form can grow. This matters for making medicines. It also bears on why the molecules of life mostly occur in one form, though it does not settle that question.
Literature: Anne Carson
Anne Carson, the Canadian poet, essayist and translator born in Toronto in 1950, won for a bold and inventive body of work. She blends classical Greek writing with modern forms and moves between poetry, prose and translation.
Her best-known books include Eros the Bittersweet (1986), Autobiography of Red (1998), a novel in verse that retells the myth of Geryon, The Beauty of the Husband (2001) and Nox (2010), an elegy for her brother. The prize honours her whole output, not any one title.
Peace: Navi Pillay
Navanethem “Navi” Pillay of South Africa won for her efforts to promote peace and international law. Born in Durban in 1941, she opened her own law practice in Natal in 1967, the first woman to do so in the province, and defended anti-apartheid activists. In 1995 she became the first Black woman judge on South Africa’s High Court.
She later served as a judge, and from 1999 to 2003 as president, of the tribunal for the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Its 1998 Akayesu judgment held that rape can be an act of genocide when committed with the required intent. She was a judge at the International Criminal Court from 2003 to 2008 and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2008 to 2014.
Her award has drawn controversy. From 2021 to 2025 she chaired a UN commission of inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel. Its September 2025 report concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza, which Israeli authorities rejected. A commission’s findings are not a court judgment. The prize citation is broader than Gaza.
Economics: how decisions add up
Robert E. Hall and Michael Woodford won for the microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilisation. In plain terms, they explain how choices by households and firms add up to inflation, jobs and recessions.
Hall’s work looked at how households decide what to spend and what to save, given what they expect to earn. Woodford’s work put expectations at the centre of monetary policy, including how a central bank’s public signals about its future plans can change spending and pricing now.
Who picks the winners
Different bodies choose each prize. The Karolinska Institutet’s Nobel Assembly picks medicine, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences picks physics, chemistry and economics, the Swedish Academy picks literature and the Norwegian Nobel Committee picks peace. Nomination lists are kept secret for 50 years. The economics prize is formally the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, set up by Sweden’s central bank in 1968.
What happens next
The laureates receive their medals and diplomas on December 10. The peace prize is presented in Oslo and the other prizes in Stockholm.
