Venezuelan politician Maria Corina Machado wins Nobel Peace Prize 2025 for promoting democratic rights

Nobel Committee president Jorgen Watne Frydnes said: “In the long history of the Nobel Peace Prize, this committee has seen any type of campaign, media tensions… we receive thousands of letters every year of people saying what peace to them. This committee sits in a room filled with portraits of all laureates. It’s filled with courage and integrity. We base our decisions only on work and the will of Alfred Nobel.”

Trump has repeatedly expressed that he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, often comparing himself to Barack Obama, who won the award early in his presidency in 2009 for promoting diplomacy and international cooperation.  Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York in September, Trump said, “Everyone says I should get the Nobel Peace Prize. I ended seven wars. No president or prime minister has ever done anything close to that.”

The Nobel Prizes usually follow the same schedule each time. First the prize for Medicine is announced, followed by Physics, Chemistry, Literature, Peace, and Economics.

A look at this year’s winners

Medicine: The first Nobel Prize of this year, the prize for Physiology or Medicine, has been awarded to Mary E Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi for their work on the human immune system. Brunkow and Ramsdell are from the USA, while Sakaguchi is from Japan. The research by the two Americans proved to be the second chapter of something Sakaguchi had worked on separately some years ago. After Brunkow and Ramsdell’s findings, Sakaguchi and other scientists managed to stitch their work together.

Chemistry: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this year goes to Richard Robson, Susumu Kitagawa, and Omar Yaghi, who have been honoured for creating molecular constructions with ‘rooms’ in between in which desired gases or chemicals can be stored. The three have “developed a new form of molecular architecture.” In their constructions, metal ions function as cornerstones that are linked by long organic (carbon-based) molecules. Together, the metal ions and molecules are organised to form crystals that contain large cavities. These porous materials are called metal-organic frameworks (MOF). Some of the uses of MOFs can be trapping moisture from desert air to get water, or trapping ethylene gas from fruits so that they ripen, and thus spoil, slowly.

Physics: John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis have been awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit”. Their work, done in the mid-1980s, set the stage for the development of quantum computers, which is one of the most active areas of scientific research right now.

Literature: The 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, 71, for his “singular prose that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.” 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.

Previous Nobel peace prize winners (from 2000)