The Nobel Prizes
The Nobel Prizes are awarded under the will of Alfred Bernhard Nobel, Swedish chemist and engineer, who died in 1896. The interest of the fund is divided
The distribution of prizes was begun on December 10, 1901, the anniversary of Nobel's death. The amount of each prize varies with the income from the fund and currently is about $190,000. No Nobel Prizes were awarded for 1940, 1941, and 1942; prizes for literature were not awarded for 1914, 1918, and 1943. See Nobel Prizes (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0777579.html) for the complete list of winners.
Women Nobel Prize Winners for Literature
1909 Selma Lagerlof (Sweden)
1926 Grazia Deledda (Italy)
1928 Sigrid Undset (Norway)
1938 Pearl Buck (U.S.)
1945 Gabriela Mistral (Chile)
1966 Nelly Sachs (Sweden)
1991 Nadine Gordimer (South Africa)
1993 Toni Morrison (U.S.)
1996 Wislawa Szymborska (Poland)
2004 Elfriede Jelinek (Austria)
2007 Doris Lessing (United Kingdom)
2009 Herta Müller (Germany)
2013 Alice Munro (Canada)
2015 Svetlana Alexievich (Belarus)
Women Nobel Peace Prize Winners
1905 Bertha von Suttner (Austria)
1931 Jane Addams (U.S.)
1946 Emily G. Balch and John R. Mott (U.S.)
1976 Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams (both Northern Ireland)
1979 Mother Teresa of Calcutta (India)
1982 Alva Myrdal (Sweden)
1991 Daw Aung San Suu Kyi (Burma)
1992 Rigoberta Menchu (Guatemala)
1997 International Campaign to Ban Landmines and Jody Williams (U.S.)
2003 Shirin Ebadi (Iran)
2004 Wangari Maathai (Kenya)
2011 Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (Liberia), Leymah Gbowee (Liberia) and Tawakkul Karman (Yemen)
2014 Malala Yousafzai (Pakistan)
Women Nobel Prize Winners for Economic Sciences
2009 Elinor Ostrom (U.S.)
Women Nobel Prize Winners for Science
Marie Sklodowska Curie (Physics, 1903; and Chemistry, 1911)
Marie Curie is considered the most famous of all women scientists. She was the only person ever to win two Nobel Prizes. By the time she was 16, Marie had already won a gold medal at the Russian lycee in Poland upon the completion of her secondary education. In 1891, almost penniless, she began her education at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1903, her discovery of radioactivity earned her the Nobel Prize in physics. In 1911, she won it for chemistry.
Irene Curie (Chemistry, 1935)
Irene Curie was the daughter of Marie Curie. She furthered her mother's work in radioactivity and won the Nobel Prize for discovering that radioactivity could be artificially produced.
Gerty Radnitz Cori (Biochemistry, 1947)
Gerty Cori was the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize in science. She studied enzymes and hormones, and her work brought researchers closer to understanding diabetes. She won the Nobel Prize for discovering the enzymes that convert glycogen into sugar and back again to glycogen.
Barbara McClintock (Physiology or Medicine, 1983)
Barbara McClintock studied the chromosomes in corn/maize and her work uncovered antibiotic-resistant bacteria and a possible cure for African sleeping sickness.
Maria Goeppert Mayer (Physics, 1963)
Maria researched the structure of atomic nuclei. During World War II she worked on isotope separation for the atomic bomb project.
Rita Levi-Montalicini (Physiology or Medicine, 1986)
Rita is an Italian neuroembryologist known for her co-discovery in 1954 of nerve growth factor, a previously unknown protein that stimulates the growth of nerve cells and plays a role in degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's disease. She received the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1986.
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (Chemistry, 1964)
Dorothy discovered the structures of penicillin and vitamin B(12). She won the Nobel Prize for determining the structure of biochemical compounds essential to combating pernicious anemia.
Gertrude Elion (Physiology or Medicine, 1988)
Gertrude Elion is the only woman inventor inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame. She invented the leukemia-fighting drug 6-mercaptopurine. Her continued research led to Imuran, a derivative of 6-mercaptopurine that blocks the body's rejection of foreign tissues.
Rosalyn Sussman Yalow (Medicine, 1977)
Rosayln Yalow won the Nobel Prize for developing radioimmunoassay, a test of body tissues that uses radioactive isotopes to measure the concentrations of hormones, viruses, vitamins, enzymes, and drugs.
Christiane Nusslein-Volhard (Physiology or Medicine, 1995)
Christiane Nusslein-Volhard won the Nobel Prize using the fruit fly to help explain birth defects in humans.
Linda Buck (Physiology or Medicine, 2004)
She and fellow American Richard Axel discovered how the olfactory system--the sense of smell--works and how people are able to recognize and remember more than 10,000 odors.
Françoise Barrç-Sinoussi (Physiology or Medicine, 2008)
Françoise Barrç-Sinoussi and fellow French virologist Luc Montagnier won the Nobel Prize for their discovery of human immunodeficiency virus. They received the prize jointly with German virologist Harald zur Hausen for his discovery of human papilloma viruses causing cervical cancer.
Elizabeth H. Blackburn and Carol W. Greider (Physiology or Medicine, 2009)
Blackburn, Greider, and fellow American Jack W. Szostak won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase.
Ada E. Yonath (Chemistry, 2009)
Crystallographer Ada E. Yonath, along with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz, won the Nobel Prize for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome.
May-Britt Moser (Physiology or Medicine, 2014)
Norwegian neuroscientist May-Britt Moser, along with John O'Keefe and Edvard I. Moser, won the Nobel Prize for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain.
Tu Youyou (Physiology or Medicine, 2015)
Chinese medical scientist Tu Youyou won the Nobel Prize for her discoveries concerning a novel therapy against Malaria.
The Pulitzer Prizes
The Pulitzer Prizes, established and endowed by Joseph Pulitzer (1847–1911), honor excellence in American literature, journalism, drama, and music. The prizes, administered by Columbia University, bestow on winners both literary prestige and a cash prize. See Pulitzer Prizes (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0777580.html) for a complete list of winners.
Women Pulitzer Prize Winners for Poetry
1918 Sara Teasdale for Love Songs
1919 Margaret Widdemer for Old Road to Paradise
1923 Edna St. Vincent Millay for The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver; A Few Figs from Thistles; eight sonnets in American Poetry, 1922, A Miscellany
1926 Amy Lowell for What's O'Clock
1927 Leonora Speyer for Fiddler's Farewell
1935 Audrey Wurdemann for Bright Ambush
1938 Marya Zaturenska for Cold Morning Sky
1950 Gwendolyn Brooks for Annie Allen
1952 Marianne Moore for Collected Poems
1956 Elizabeth Bishop for Poems – North & South
1961 Phyllis McGinley for Times Three: Selected Verse from Three Decades
1967 Anne Sexton for Live or Die
1973 Maxine Winokur Kumin for Up Country
1982 Sylvia Plath for The Collected Poems
1984 Mary Oliver for American Primitive
1985 Carolyn Kizer for Yin
1987 Rita Dove for Thomas and Beulah
1991 Mona Van Duyn for Near Changes
1993 Louise Gluck for The Wild Iris
1993 Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Rita Dove named Poet Laureate of the U.S.
1996 Jorie Graham for The Dream of the Unified Field
1997 Lisel Mueller for Alive Together: New Selected Poems
2006 Claudia Emerson for Late Wife
2007 Natasha Trethewey for Native Guard
2010 Rae Armantrout for Versed
2011 Kay Ryan for The Best of It: New and Selected Poems
2012 Tracy K. Smith for Life on Mars
2013 Sharon Olds for Stag's Leap
Women Pulitzer Prize Winners for Fiction
1921 Edith Wharton for The Age of Innocence
1923 Willa Cather for One of Ours
1924 Margaret Wilson for The Able McLaughlins
1925 Edna Ferber for So Big
1929 Julia Peterkin for Scarlet Sister
1931 Margaret Ayer Barnes for Years of Grace
1932 Pearl Buck for The Good Earth
1934 Caroline Miller for Lamb in His Bosom
1935 Josephine Winslow Johnson for Now in November
1937 Margaret Mitchell for Gone with the Wind
1939 Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings for The Yearling
1942 Ellen Glasgow for In This Our Life
1961 Harper Lee for To Kill a Mockingbird
1965 Shirley Ann Grau for The Keepers of the House
1966 Katherine Anne Porter for The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter
1970 Jean Stafford for Collected Stories
1973 Eudora Welty for The Optimist's Daughter
1983 Alice Walker for The Color Purple
1985 Alison Lurie for Foreign Affairs
1988 Toni Morrison for Beloved
1989 Anne Tyler for Breathing Lessons
1992 Jane Smiley for A Thousand Acres
1994 E. Annie Proulx for The Shipping News
1995 Carol Shields for The Stone Diaries
2000 Jhumpa Lahiri for Interpreter of Maladies
2005 Marilynne Robinson for Gilead
2006 Geraldine Brooks for March
2009 Elizabeth Strout for Olive Kitteridge
2011 Jennifer Egan for A Visit from the Goon Squad
2014 Donna Tartt for The Goldfinch
Women Pulitzer Prize Winners for Drama
1921 Zona Gale for Miss Lulu Bett
1931 Susan Glaspell for Alison's House
1935 Zoe Akins for The Old Maid
1945 Mary Chase for Harvey
1956 Frances Goodrich (with Albert Hackett) for The Diary of Anne Frank
1958 Ketti Frings for Look Homeward, Angel
1981 Beth Henley for Crimes of the Heart
1983 Marsha Norman for 'Night Mother
1989 Wendy Wasserstein for The Heidi Chronicles
1998 Paula Vogel for How I Learned to Drive
1999 Margaret Edson for Wit
2002 Suzan-Lori Parks for Topdog/Underdog
2009 Lynn Nottage for Ruined
2012 Quiara Alegría Hudes for Water by the Spoonful
2014 Annie Baker for The Flick
Women Pulitzer Prize Winners for General Nonfiction
1963 Barbara W. Tuchman for The Guns of August
1968 Will and Ariel Durant for Rousseau and Revolution
1972 Barbara W. Tuchman for Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-1945
1973 Frances FitzGerald for Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam; Robert M. Coles for Children of Crisis (Vols. 1 and 2)
1974 Annie Dillard for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
1983 Susan Sheehan for Is There No Place on Earth for Me?
1996 Tina Rosenberg for The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism
2002 Diane McWhorter for Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution
2003 Samantha Power for "A Problem From Hell:" America and the Age of Genocide
2004 Anne Applebaum for Gulag: A History
2006 Caroline Elkins for Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya
2015 Elizabeth Kolbert for The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Women Pulitzer Prize Winners for History
1942 Margaret Leech for Reveille in Washington
1943 Esther Forbes for Paul Revere and the World He Lived In
1959 Leonard D. White, assisted by Jean Schneider for The Republican Era 1869-1901
1960 Margaret Leech for In the Days of McKinley
1963 Constance McLaughlin Green for Washington, Village and Capital, 1800-1878
1991 Laurel Thatcher Ulrich for A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary 1785-1812
1995 Doris Kearns Goodwin for No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II
2009 Annette Gordon-Reed for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
2015 Elizabeth A. Fenn for Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People
Women Pulitzer Prize Winners for Biography/Autobiography
1917 Laura E. Richards and Maude Howe Elliott, assisted by Florence Howe Hall for Julia Ward Howe
1941 Ola E. Winslow for Jonathan Edwards
1946 Linnie Marsh Wolfe for Son of the Wilderness
1947 Margaret Clapp for Forgotten First Citizen: John Bigelow
1951 Margaret Louise Coit for John C. Calhoun: American Portrait
1958 Douglas Southall Freeman (Vols. 1-6) and John Alexander Carroll and Mary Wells (Vol. 7) for George Washington
1986 Elizabeth Frank for Louise Bogan: A Portrait
1995 Joan D. Hedrick for Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life
1998 Katharine Graham for Personal History
2000 Stacy Schiff for Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)
2014 Megan Marshall for Margaret Fuller: A New American Life
Women Pulitzer Prize Winners for Music
1983 Ellen T. Zwilich for Three Movements for Orchestra
1991 Shulamit Ran for Symphony
1999 Melinda Wagner for Concerto for Flute, Strings, and Percussion
2010 Jennifer Higdon for Violin Concerto
2013 Caroline Shaw for Partita for 8 Voices
