Nobel Prizes are traditionally highly coveted and prestigious awards, cherished by recipients and carrying global fame and a hefty financial reward for winners, selected for their outstanding works and contributions.
Arguably the most famous of the prizes set out by Swedish inventor and entrepreneur Alfred Nobel in his will in 1895, is the Peace Prize, which includes an 18-carat gold medal and an award of more than US$1 million ($1.7m) for an individual or organisation most contributing to “fraternity between nations”.
On Thursday, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado gifted hers to US President Donald Trump in a meeting at the White House.
Here’s what to know about whether a Nobel Prize can be regifted.
Machado, an opposition leader who spent almost a year in hiding before escaping Venezuela late last year, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October, with the Nobel Committee describing her as “a woman who keeps the flame of democracy burning amid a growing darkness”. While Machado dedicated the prize to the “suffering people of Venezuela” and Trump “for his decisive support of our cause”, the White House accused the committee of placing “politics over peace” in its decision.
But since the US mission to oust Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in early January, Machado appears to have been sidelined by the Trump administration, which publicly backed Maduro’s Vice-President and questioned Machado’s ability to lead Venezuela.
In an interview with Fox News last week, Machado praised Trump and said she and the Venezuelan people wanted to “share” the prize with him, in an apparent bid to gain favour with the United States.
Trump, who had publicly coveted the prize and claimed to have “solved” a number of international conflicts, accepted the award on Thursday, describing the move as a “wonderful gesture of mutual respect”.
Nobel’s prizes reward outstanding efforts in the fields that he was most involved in during his lifetime: physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace, with the first prize awarded in 1901. The prize for economic sciences was added in 1969.
The position of the Norwegian Nobel Committee and the Norwegian Nobel Institute has been clear.
“Once a Nobel Prize is announced, it cannot be revoked, shared or transferred to others,” they said in a statement last week. “The decision is final and stands for all time.”
“A medal can change owners, but the title of a Nobel Peace Prize laureate cannot,” the Nobel Peace Centre wrote on social media Thursday.
The Nobel Peace Prize medals bear the portrait of Alfred Nobel and are engraved with the name of the laureate and the phrase: “Pro pace et fraternitate gentium”, which translated means, “For the peace and brotherhood of men”.
Until 1980, they were made of 23-carat gold, weighing approximately 200g. Since then, they have been made of 18-carat recycled gold and mostly weigh about 175g, according to the Nobel Committee.
There have been a handful of occasions where a Nobel Prize medal has been sold.
In 2019, the estate of the late mathematician John F. Nash, jnr – made famous in the 2021 Russell Crowe movie A Beautiful Mind – auctioned his Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences medal, received in 1994 for his contributions to Game Theory, for US$735,000, according to auction house Christie’s.
British scientist James Watson, part of a team that helped discover the structure of DNA, auctioned off his 1962 Nobel Prize Medal in Medicine or Physiology in 2014, fetching US$4,757,000. He also auctioned a handwritten Nobel Prize “Banquet” speech for US$365,000.
More recently, in 2022, Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov sold his Nobel Peace Prize medal for US$103.5m to an anonymous buyer at an auction event in New York, with the proceeds raised going to support UN humanitarian work in Ukraine, Heritage Auctions said at the time. Muratov, founding editor of the fiercely independent Novaya Gazeta newspaper, shared the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize with the Philippine journalist Maria Ressa.
Recipients can refuse a Nobel Prize, but declining “this distinction does not in the least modify the validity of the award”, the Nobel Committee has said.
Author Jean-Paul Sartre declined the Nobel Prize in literature in 1964, stating he did not want to be “institutionalised” and fearing it would limit the impact of his writing.
Vietnamese politician Le Duc Tho refused the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize jointly awarded to him and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for negotiating the Vietnam peace accord. Le Duc Tho said he felt peace had not truly been established in Vietnam.
Nobel Prizes cannot be revoked once awarded, according to the committee, as neither Alfred Nobel’s will nor the Statutes of the Nobel Foundation mention any such possibility, it has said.
Choices of recipients are also not reconsidered for the same reasons, it has said. According to the foundation statutes, “no appeals may be made against the decision of a prize-awarding body with regards to the award of a prize”.
Author Ernest Hemingway was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature “for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea”. Hemingway, whose novel was set in Cuba where he lived at the time, said the prize “belongs to Cuba”, where he said his work “was created and conceived”, and reportedly set the medal at the feet of a shrine at the famed Virgin of Charity of El Cobre church in Cuba.
– The Washington Post