The “Door of Europe” monument, which commemorates migrants who died on their journey, is seen on the southern Italian island of Lampedusa.
Alessandro Bianchi/Reuters
Bob Dylan said songs are meant to be sung not read, and he has a point. Songs and poems obey different rules.
Bob Dylan pictured in 2012: his long synopses of a seemingly random list of books made up the bulk of this week’s Nobel Prize speech.
Mario Anzuoni/Reuters
New research out this month has led to speculation that the acceleration of the expanding universe might not be real after all. So what’s really going on?
What does the Nobel mean for America?
Amelia Gapin
Immigrants have contributed to America’s great success at the Nobel. Of the 350 Nobel winners from the United States, more than 100 have been immigrants.
A portrait of Indian poet and musician Rabindranath Tagore.
Cherishsantosh/Wikimedia Commons
In 1913, an Indian literary giant named Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-white person to win the literature prize. He wrote over 2,000 songs and, like Dylan’s, they still resonate today.
Author Gabriel García Márquez – the first Colombian to win a Nobel prize, for literature – also dreamed of peace.
John Vizcaino/Reuters
From the yellow butterflies of his ‘Hundred Years of Solitude’ to his Nobel acceptance speech, author Gabriel García Márquez remains ever present in his country’s peace process.
Is Bob Dylan a poet in the great tradition of Sappho?
In the days of Sappho, John William Godward
Ancient poems were accompanied by a musical instrument called the lyre – from which we get the word ‘lyric’. ‘Literature’ and ‘poetry’ are categories of our own making - so moving beyond them in a major award seems long overdue.
Dylan is a musician, who has been well recognised in his field.
Simon Murphy/Flickr
Were there really no poets or novelists or essayists - no people who have spent their lives in the field of literature - considered Nobel-worthy? This nostalgic decision is discourteous to writers.
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos wins the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize.
REUTERS/John Vizcaino
Scholars share their research with former combatants in Colombia, after a majority of Colombians voted against a peace deal. Can understanding reintegration help peace negotiations move forward?
Autophagy lets neurons clear out harmful proteins.
UCI Research via Flickr
Yoshinori Ohsumi’s research on autophagy – a process that lets cells clear out harmful materials – brought biology and medicine closer to finding treatments for chronic and deadly diseases.
A week of extreme emotions in Colombia ends with a Nobel Peace Prize for its president. But will it help the country avoid descending back into civil war?
Things are kind of different on the quantum level.
Nandini Trivedi
Forget solid, liquid, gas. This research used advanced math to theorize about topological phases of matter. And over the years experiments with matter and cold atoms have been validating the ideas.
Why would anyone award a prize to a rejected peace deal?
Colombians march in the city of Cali to support the peace deal that was narrowly rejected in an October 2 plebiscite. The 50%-50% vote showed how polarized the country is.
Jaime Saldarriaga/Reuters
Nobel Prize aside, Colombia continues to choose war over peace and uncertainty over resolution. Is it something ingrained in the national psyche, or the product of a tangled-up political process?
There’s no Nobel Prize in mathematics, but math undergirds much high-level science. The 2016 Nobel in Physics rewards work in topology, a branch of math with multiple real world applications.