The Nobel Institute's own history calls the 1973 Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho the most controversial ever: Le Duc Tho refused it and two commi…
Theodore Roosevelt won for mediating the end of the Russo-Japanese War, yet he was best known for a bellicose foreign policy. The Nobel committee's own secretary and adv…
German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky, held in Nazi camps, was awarded the 1935 prize in 1936. Two committee members stepped aside and Hitler banned Germans from accepting…
Nominated five times, Gandhi was assassinated in January 1948. The committee considered a posthumous prize but gave no award, citing no suitable living candidate.
Egas Moniz shared the medicine prize for leucotomy. The operation caused serious personality changes and was abandoned once antipsychotic drugs arrived.
Winston Churchill won the Literature Prize for his histories and oratory while serving as prime minister. Critics said the Academy honoured a political reputation.
Watson, Crick and Wilkins won for DNA's structure. Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray Photo 51 was crucial, had died in 1958, and prizes are capped at three people.
Kissinger and Le Duc Tho won for a Vietnam cease-fire that never held. Tho refused, two committee members resigned, and Kissinger later tried to return the prize.
Arafat, Rabin and Peres shared the prize for the Oslo Accords. Arafat's armed-struggle past led committee member Kare Kristiansen to resign.
Nominated 12 days into his presidency, Barack Obama won for strengthening diplomacy. A former Nobel Institute director later wrote it did not achieve what the committee…
Bob Dylan won for new poetic expressions within the American song tradition. He stayed silent for two weeks, skipped the ceremony and lectured by recording in 2017.
Peter Handke's prize drew outrage over his defence of Serbia and his speech at Milosevic's funeral. A member of the Nobel literature committee resigned.
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