The Nobel Peace Prize Quiz: Six Questions Before Friday's Reveal

The Norwegian Nobel Committee names the next Peace Prize laureate on Friday in Oslo, and the guesswork is already in overdrive. Two hundred eighty-seven nominations are on the table this year, split between two hundred eight individuals and seventy-nine organizations, while the official list stays sealed for fifty years under Nobel Foundation rules. That secrecy is why every frontrunner list is really an educated guess dressed up as math. Before the name drops, this Nobel Peace Prize quiz packs the prize's history, its strangest facts, and this year's race into six questions, with the answers sitting right below each one. It has been quite a Nobel week already: the medicine prize went to the optogenetics pioneers, a story worth testing yourself on, and the literature prize went to Anne Carson, the genre-bending Canadian poet.

The rules of this Nobel Peace Prize quiz are simple. Read the question, commit to an answer, then check the bolded line. A scoring guide waits at the bottom. Starting with the announcement itself.

The six questions

This Nobel Peace Prize quiz leans toward history, odds, and past winners, so if your feed has been all prize speculation, you are playing from behind.

1. The 2026 laureate gets named on Friday. Who announces it, and where?

Answer: The Norwegian Nobel Committee, in Oslo. The full announcement schedule published by Jagran Josh has the Peace Prize down for Friday at eleven in the morning Central European Summer Time at the Norwegian Nobel Institute. The Peace Prize is the only Nobel awarded outside Sweden: the rest are handed out in Stockholm, while Nobel's will sent the peace prize to Oslo. The winner also takes home twelve million Swedish crowns, roughly one point two million dollars, the figure Reuters reported for this year's literature prize.

2. Bookmakers and prediction markets agree on one frontrunner. Which name sits on top?

Answer: Sudan's Emergency Response Rooms. The volunteer relief network leads the bookmaker boards at three to one and sits around fifteen percent on Polymarket, ahead of Doctors Without Borders, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and Yulia Navalnaya, according to Oddspedia's odds comparison. The network already picked up the Rafto Prize and a Right Livelihood Award in twenty twenty-five, which is exactly the kind of resume the Oslo committee likes. With two hundred eighty-seven nominees in the mix and the real shortlist sealed for fifty years, the favorite is still a long shot in absolute terms.

3. Who won the Peace Prize last year?

Answer: Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado. Her twenty twenty-five win caught most markets off guard, since she was not among the shortest-priced names in many of them, Oddspedia noted. That is the running theme with this prize: the committee in Oslo has a long record of surprising everyone, which is worth remembering before trusting any odds board too much.

4. Which organization took the twenty twenty-four prize, and why?

Answer: Nihon Hidankyo, the Japanese organization of atomic bombing survivors. The Norwegian Nobel Committee honored the group "for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again," NPR reported. The survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, known as Hibakusha, were recognized as the nuclear taboo came under fresh pressure.

5. Who is the youngest Nobel laureate in history, and how old were they?

Answer: Malala Yousafzai, at seventeen. She shared the twenty fourteen Peace Prize with Indian children's rights activist Kailash Satyarthi for their struggle for children's education. She was sitting in chemistry class when the news broke and finished out the school day anyway, Science News Explores reported.

6. The first Peace Prize was split between two men in nineteen hundred one. Who were they, and what did Nobel's will say the prize should reward?

Answer: Swiss humanitarian Henri Dunant and French pacifist Frédéric Passy. Dunant founded the Red Cross movement; Passy spent his life on peace conferences and arbitration. Nobel's will said the prize should go to whoever had done the most for "fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses," The Hindu BusinessLine reported, quoting the will. The first ceremony took place in Oslo that December.

Score yourself

Scoring this Nobel Peace Prize quiz takes ten seconds. Six right: dangerously well informed, and possibly reading too much news. Four or five on the Nobel Peace Prize quiz: the feed treated you well this week. Three or fewer: check back on Friday morning, when Oslo hands out the real answers.

That wraps this Nobel Peace Prize quiz for the eve of the announcement. Send the Nobel Peace Prize quiz to a friend and compare scores before Friday's reveal. The committee speaks on Friday; until then, the odds boards are entertainment. For one more Nobel story from this week, the physics prize went to a neutrino hunter who spent decades on particles that barely exist.