The Nobel Prize Quiz: 10 Questions Before the 2026 Winners Are Named

This year's Nobel announcements run October 5 to October 12, with the medicine prize opening the week and the economic sciences prize closing it. Before the names land, this nobel prize quiz checks how much you actually know about the prizes: the dynamite fortune behind them, the double winners, and the one ceremony held in a different city. Each question gives the answer right below it, so keep score as you go.

Ten questions, one point each. Seven or more means you follow the prizes properly. Five or six means you know the headlines. Fewer than five means the announcements are your fresh start. A few of these answers surprise even people who think they know the lore, which is the whole point of a nobel prize quiz.

How this nobel prize quiz works

Read each question, commit to an answer, then read the answer beneath it. The facts come from the Nobel Foundation's official records and its published 2026 announcement schedule, with attributions where they matter. Questions about 2026 figures are flagged as reported, not official.

The ten questions

1. Which Nobel Prize is announced first each year? The 2026 announcement week follows a fixed order, and this nobel prize quiz opens with the calendar.

Answer: physiology or medicine. It is announced first, on the Monday of the week, by the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet, according to the Nobel Foundation's schedule.

2. Alfred Nobel made his fortune from what invention? The money behind this nobel prize quiz starts here: he was a Swedish chemist, engineer and industrialist before his will created the prizes.

Answer: dynamite. The explosive built his fortune, and his will directed that fortune toward prizes honoring work that conferred the greatest benefit to humankind, according to the Nobel Foundation's biography of him.

3. How many prizes did Alfred Nobel's will create? Name them if you can.

Answer: five. The original prizes were physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace. Everything else came later.

4. Which of the current prizes is NOT one of the original five? This nobel prize quiz gets trickier here.

Answer: the prize in economic sciences. Sveriges Riksbank, Sweden's central bank, established it in 1968 for the bank's three hundredth anniversary, and the first one was awarded in 1969 to Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen. It is announced and presented with the Nobel Prizes but was not in Nobel's will.

5. The Peace Prize is announced in which city? The other prizes all go out from the same city, and this nobel prize quiz tests whether you know the exception.

Answer: Oslo. The Norwegian Nobel Committee announces the peace prize there, while physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and economic sciences are announced in Stockholm. Nobel's will assigned the peace prize to a Norwegian committee.

6. Who is the youngest Nobel laureate? One answer dominates every trivia night version of this question.

Answer: Malala Yousafzai. She was seventeen when she received the 2014 Peace Prize, shared with Kailash Satyarthi, for her fight for the right of all children to education.

7. Who is the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences? A record this nobel prize quiz had to include. She is also the only woman on this list twice.

Answer: Marie Curie. She won physics in 1903 and chemistry in 1911, and she remains the only laureate with Nobel Prizes in two different scientific fields.

8. Which musician won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and in what year?

Answer: Bob Dylan, in 2016, honored for what the Swedish Academy called "having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition." He remains the only musician to receive the literature prize.

9. In what year were the first Nobel Prizes awarded? The prizes did not start the year Nobel died.

Answer: 1901. The first physics prize went to Wilhelm Röntgen for the discovery of X-rays, and the first peace prize was shared by Henry Dunant, founder of the Red Cross, and Frédéric Passy.

10. How much is a full Nobel Prize worth in 2026? This is the one figure in this nobel prize quiz that changed this year.

Answer: twelve million Swedish kronor. The amount was raised for the 2026 prizes, NordiskPost reported, up from the previous level. A prize shared by multiple laureates divides the money among them.

Score yourself

Seven to ten: you could argue about the shortlists with confidence. Four to six: solid, but the history section needs work. Three or fewer: spend announcement week on the Nobel Foundation's site and retake this nobel prize quiz next year.

Want more science to test yourself on later? Read about pines in the Southern Hemisphere growing far faster than the same species back home and heat stress slowing photosynthesis in coast redwoods, then come back and argue about next year's medicine shortlist. The 2026 announcement schedule is published in full at nobelprize.org, which lists every date and institution for the October week.