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STOCKHOLM: The 2012 Nobel prizes will be announced between October 8 and 15, the Nobel Foundation said Wednesday, with Helmut Kohl, Bill Clinton, the EU and WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning in the running for the Peace Prize.
The Peace Prize, the most celebrated of the prestigious awards, will be announced on October 12 in Oslo by the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
The names of the nominees are a closely-guarded secret, but those who submit nominations are allowed to disclose their choice.
The list for the peace prize is known to comprise the names of 231 individuals and organisations, close to last year’s record of 241 when the award as split between Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Liberian activist Leymah Gbowee and Yemeni “Arab Spring” activist Tawakkol Karman.
Among the people known to have been nominated for this year’s honour are former US president Bill Clinton, ex-German chancellor Helmut Kohl -- who led his country’s reunification process -- and Ukraine’s ex-premier and now jailed opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko.
Also on the list is jailed US soldier Bradley Manning, who has been charged with 22 counts in a US military court for turning over a massive cache of classified US documents to anti-secrecy site WikiLeaks.
Despite its current crisis, the European Union is also among the candidates, as are Congolese doctor Denis Mukwege, Cuban dissidents Oswaldo Paya and Yoani Sanchez, and Russian rights group Memorial and its founder Svetlana Gannushkina.
The 2012 Nobel season will kick off with the announcement in Stockholm of the prize for medicine or physiology on October 8, to be followed by the physics prize on October 9, the chemistry prize on October 10 and the prize for economics on October 15.
In keeping with tradition, the Swedish Academy will set the date for its announcement of the Literature Prize later. It is traditionally awarded on a Thursday, and could therefore be announced on October 11 or October 18.
Each Nobel comes with a prize sum, which in recent years has been 10 million Swedish kronor (1.12 million euros, $1.47 million) per discipline, to be shared if more than one laureate is honoured.
