All eyes on Nobel prizes during new week! The people have started betting!

The 2017 Nobel season opens next week, on Monday with the announcement of the medicine prize, followed by the physics award on Tuesday and the chemistry prize on Wednesday. The peace prize will be announced on October 6, while the date for the literature prize is revealed only a few days in advance but traditionally falls on a Thursday, so October 5 and 12 are seen as possible dates. The names of the candidates are kept secret for at least 50 years, so in those day people have now started betting on the 2017 Nobel Prize. The Nobel prize, for peace, was created by the inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel, is the only Nobel awarded in Oslo. Last year, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos won for his efforts to bring peace to his country, ravaged by more than a half-century of conflict. This year, 318 people and organisations have been nominated. Speculation has focused about the tensions between Washington and Pyongyang as well as uncertainty over the Iran deal, which US President Donald Trump has threatened to tear up. Two actors of that accord, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and EU, foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, are seen as strong contenders by the head of the Peace Research Institute of Oslo, Henrik Urdal. Even and US President Donald Trump, who has exchanged threats with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in recent weeks, has been nominated by an unidentified American who wants him honoured for “his peace through strength ideology”. For the literature prize, the Swedish Academy also keeps mum about its list of nominees. Many of the same names reappear year after year. Israel’s Amos Oz and David Grossmann, Italy’s Claudio Magris, Albania’s Ismail Kadare and France’s Michel Houellebecq again are frequently mentioned. But Stockholm’s literary circles agree on one thing: “What happened last year was really unusual. This year I think it’ll be a male novelist or essayist with roots in Europe. I think it’s going to be the exact opposite of Bob Dylan,” predicted Bjorn Wiman, the cultural editor of Sweden’s main daily Dagens Nyheter. He thinks Antonio Lobo Antunes of Portugal and Albania’s Ismail Kadare have a good chance. “Everyone will think ‘Of course they deserve the prize’, and there’ll be no objection.” This year, each Nobel comes with a nine million kronor (US$1.1million) prize sum, to be shared if several laureates are honoured in the same discipline. The economics prize, the only award not included in Nobel’s will, is funded by the Swedish central bank. Also those believed to be on the list for other prices, like that of medicine, chemistry or physics are as many and include Syria’s White Helmets rescue service, Congolese doctor Denis Mukwege, jailed Saudi blogger Raif Badawi and Edward Snowden, who revealed the scope of America’s NSA electronic surveillance programme. There are 911 men, women and organisations have won a Nobel Prize since it is created. To honour “those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind” in the fields of literature, peace, medicine, physics and chemistry.