Nobel Peace Prize 2025 Winner Live Updates: Venezuelan politician Maria Corina Machado announced as the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner

The Norwegian Nobel Committee on Friday announced Venezuelan democracy campaigner María Corina Machado as the winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize. She was honoured for her efforts to promote democratic rights in Venezuela and for her struggle to bring about a transition to democracy, the Committee said in its statement.

The Nobel Committee praised Machado as “one of the most extraordinary examples of civilian courage in Latin America in recent times”. It noted her efforts to defend judicial independence, human rights, and free elections despite harassment, threats, and years spent in hiding.

“Despite the risk of harassment, arrest and torture, citizens across the country held watch over the polling stations. They made sure the final tallies were documented before the regime could destroy ballots and lie about the outcome,” the Committee noted.

Read here full statement

Founder of Súmate, an organisation devoted to democratic development, Machado stood up for free and fair elections more than 20 years ago. “It was a choice of ballots over bullets,” she said. In political office and in her service to organisations since then, Machado has spoken out for judicial independence, human rights and popular representation. She has spent years working for the freedom of the Venezuelan people.

Maria Corina Machado has been awarded the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced on Friday for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.

The 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner to be announced shortly.

Stay tuned!

As speculations loom whether US President Donald Trump will win the Nobel Peace Prize, let's take a look at four US presidents have won the prize in the past.

1. Theodore Roosevelt (1906)

He was the first US president to receive the prize. Roosevelt was given the award for mediating the Russo-Japanese War through the Treaty of Portsmouth.

2. Woodrow Wilson (1919)

Woodrow Wilson was the 28th president of the United States. He won the award for his role in ending World War I and creating the League of Nations, the world's first intergovernmental organisation aimed at preserving peace.

3. Jimmy Carter (2002)

Jimmy Carter was the 39th president of the United States.

Recognised "for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development," Carter received the prize 21 years after leaving office.

4. Barack Obama (2009)

Obama, the 44th president of the United States, won the award early into his presidency “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”

Emphasis was also given to his support - in word and deed - for the vision of a world free from nuclear weapons.

A nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize is only considered valid if submitted by a person who meets certain criteria.

According to the statutes of the Nobel Foundation, a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize is considered valid if it is submitted by a person who falls within one of the following categories, a personal application for an award will not be considered:

Unless otherwise stated the term 'members' shall be understood as current (sitting) members.

These criteria were revised in April 2018

(Source: https://www.nobelpeaceprize.org/)

Any person or organization can be nominated by anyone eligible to nominate.

There is no vetting of nominations prior to the nomination deadline, hence the Norwegian Nobel Committee has no influence on the quality of the submissions.

The task of the Committee is strictly limited to selecting the best candidate (or candidates) among the entire list of submissions.

To simply be nominated is therefore not an official endorsement or honour extended by the Nobel Committee, and may not be used to imply affiliation with the Nobel Peace Prize or its related institutions.

No. Neither Alfred Nobel’s will nor the Statutes of the Nobel Foundation mention any such possibility.

All living persons and active organizations or institutions are eligible candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize.

What is considered a valid nomination is defined by the Nobel Foundation’s statutes.

In order for a nomination to be valid, it must be submitted no later than January 31. Submissions shall preferably be made through an online form.

Members of the Nobel Committee may add further names to the list during their first meeting after the nomination process is closed. In 2025 the first meeting of the committee was held 26 February.

After all the qualified nominations have been discussed, a short-list of the most interesting and worthy candidates is created.

The candidates on the short-list are then subject to assessments and examinations done by the Nobel Committee's permanent advisers, together with other Norwegian or international experts.

As a rule, the Committee reaches a decision only at its very last meeting before the announcement of the year’s laureate(s) at the beginning of October.

The Committee seeks to achieve consensus in its selection of the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.

On the rare occasions when this proves impossible, the decision is reached by a simple majority vote.

(Source: https://www.nobelpeaceprize.org/)

The Norwegian Nobel Institute registered a total of 338 candidates for the 2025 peace prize, of which 244 are individuals and 94 are organisations.

Neither the names of nominators nor of nominees for the Nobel Peace Prize are revealed until 50 years have passed.

After Israel and Hamas agreed to Trump’s Gaza plan, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted an AI-generated photo of himself awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Trump on his official social media account.

“Give Donald Trump the Nobel Peace Prize — he deserves it,” Netanyahu wrote on X.

Wangari Maathai was the first female professor in Kenya and the first African woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

She founded the Green Belt Movement, which led to the planting of millions of trees.

Linus Pauling is the only person to have received two unshared Nobel Prizes - in chemistry and peace.

He used quantum mechanics to understand and describe chemical bonding.

Later he campaigned vehemently against nuclear weapons and spearheaded a petition to ban nuclear testing.

For a writer who has spent decades cultivating his own difficult, unyielding form of literary soil — slow-growing, deeply rooted, indifferent to the pressures of the season — the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature to Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, 71, awarded for his “singular prose that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”, seems only befitting.

For years, Krasznahorkai’s fiction has walked the knife-edge between despair and grace, winning him the Man Booker Prize in 2015, and the Kossuth Prize, Hungary’s highest cultural honour, in 2004, among others.

Krasznahorkai will receive the medal and diploma in a ceremony in December in Stockholm. He is the second Hungarian, after Imre Kertesz in 2002, to bag the award.

Trump might also not be a contender this year because the prize typically rewards achievements from the previous year.

By this time last year, Trump had been elected but not yet sworn in as president.

Another reason Trump may not win the Nobel Peace Prize lies in the principles guiding the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decisions.

The five-member committee bases its choices on the 1895 will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel.

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to the Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”

Russia would back US President Donald Trump's candidature for the Nobel Peace Prize, state news agency TASS quoted Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov as saying on Friday.

The winner of the 2025 prize will be announced at 0900 GMT, but experienced watchers of the award say it is highly unlikely to be Trump.

Russia has said repeatedly that it is grateful for Trump's efforts to end the war in Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in remarks published on Thursday that Kyiv would nominate Trump for the Nobel, which he openly covets, if he managed to bring about a ceasefire.

-Reuters

Groups cited as possible winners by the Peace Research Institute Oslo include:

-Sudan's Emergency Response Rooms, a community-led network that has become the backbone of the country’s humanitarian response to its civil war

-The International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court

-The Committee to Protect Journalists, a US-based group that promotes press freedom and compiles a list of journalists killed on duty.

Last year's award went to Nihon Hidankyo, a grassroots movement of Japanese atomic bombing survivors who have worked for decades to maintain a taboo around the use of nuclear weapons.

The peace prize is the only one of the annual Nobel prizes to be awarded in Oslo, Norway.

Four of the other prizes have already been awarded in the Swedish capital, Stockholm this week — in medicine on Monday, physics on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday.

The winner of the prize in economics will be announced on Monday.

-AP

The US president has been campaigning for the award for quite some time now.

He has even been critical of one of his predecessors, Barack Obama, who won it in 2009 “for extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”. Trump said Obama won the prize for “doing nothing”.

In July, The Guardian reported that the POTUS had called Norway’s finance minister and former NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg to ask about the Nobel Prize. In a UN meeting last month, Trump again claimed credit for “ending seven wars,” telling world leaders: “Everyone says I should get the Nobel Peace Prize.”

While Oslo is bracing for any reaction, Arild Hermstad, leader of Norway’s Green Party, said the Nobel Committee’s independence is what gives the prize its credibility.

The award will be announced in Norway's capital Oslo.

The possibility of Trump not winning the award has sparked concern over how he might react to being overlooked so publicly.

Kirsti Bergstø, leader of Norway’s Socialist Left Party and its foreign policy spokesperson, said Oslo must be “prepared for anything,” The Guardian reported.

“The Nobel Committee is an independent body, and the Norwegian government has no involvement in determining the prizes. But I’m not sure Trump knows that. We have to be prepared for anything from him,” Bergstø added.

The Nobel committee said on Thursday that the decision on who would be named the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize laureate was made on Monday, two days before the US President got Israel and Hamas to agree to a ceasefire as part of his Gaza peace plan.

According to this timeline and the five-member committee that decides the winner, Trump is unlikely to win the prize. The situation has also sparked concern in Norway over how he might react to being overlooked so publicly.

US President Donald Trump has many times said that he deserves a peace prize for "solving seven wars."

However, the President himself is not confident on winning.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee will announce the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize today (Friday).

Experts say the committee typically focuses on the durability of peace, the promotion of international fraternity and the quiet work of institutions that strengthen those goals.

(With inputs from AP)

Welcome to our live blog! Stay tuned to know if US President Donald Trump wins the Nobel Peace Prize.