Nobel Prize Conversations

“They're probably hoping I'll cancel the exam.” – Michael Woodford was scheduled to be setting his economics students an exam on the morning of October 12th, when he was woken by a call from Stockholm at 4:30am. Just after listening to the announcement of the 2026 prize in economic sciences, Woodford spoke to the Nobel Prize's Adam Smith about his feelings for the prize. He praised his co-laureate Robert E. Hall and explained why he admires the Swedish economist Knut Wicksell.

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In this call with the Nobel Prize soon after the announcement, Pillay says she feels overwhelmed about being a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. “A total surprise, I’m deeply honoured and touched.” – Navi Pillay received the news about her 2026 peace prize at an international conference in the Nuremberg Palace of Justice – more specifically in the famous Courtroom 600 where the WWII war criminals trials took place. Pillay was greeted with a standing ovation that she says she will never forget. In this call with the Nobel Prize soon after the announcement, Pillay says she feels overwhelmed about being a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. “I know it’s a personal award, but for me, it’s for all the institutions I served on as well, all the people I worked for.”

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“Start in the middle, I always say” – Anne Carson was sweeping the kitchen floor at her home in Reykjavík, Iceland, when the phone rang and she learned that she had been awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature.
“It seems a little insane,” Carson says in this conversation with the Nobel Prize just moments after the announcement. She also reveals that she has already started planning how to give away the prize money, shares advice for aspiring writers, and offers a tip for anyone curious about her work: “Find the middle and start there.”

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"I'm very excited to hear the news. Good news. Very good news." – In this brief conversation, recorded shortly after the announcement of his Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Kenso Soai speaks of how happy he is to have his group's work recognised. He tells the Nobel Prize's Adam Smith how the search for the foundations of homochirality is a problem first posed by Louis Pasteur, and how much pleasure he takes in sharing these ongoing explorations with scientific friends around the world.

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"In retrospect, the most amazing thing is that we got funded for this project." – Francis Halzen recalls greeting each milestone in the creation of the massive IceCube neutrino detector under the South Pole not with pride, but with surprise. In this conversation with the Nobel Prize's Adam Smith, recorded just after Halzen had learnt of his 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics, he speaks about the fruitful collaboration with the technical teams that built the detector. He also speculates on how neutrino astronomy promises to open up new, quite unexpected insights into super high energy processes occurring far away in space, and far back in time.

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