'The money is a nice part of the process': on winning a Nobel prize

How do Nobel laureates spend their winnings? And how important is the financial aspect of the award?

On the morning of 28 October 1954, Mary Welsh Hemingway, fourth wife of Ernest Hemingway, was asleep in bed when her husband crawled in alongside her to whisper: “I’ve won the thing.” “What thing?” “The Swedish thing.”

He meant, of course, the Nobel prize in literature, but for the novelist, the news was not entirely welcome. “I’m thinking of telling them to shove it,” he said, then paused. “Hell, it’s $35,000 [equivalent to about £240,000 today]. A man can have a lot of fun with $35,000.”

Next week, the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm will announce the winners of this year’s prizes for physiology or medicine, physics, chemistry and peace, with the economics and literature prizes to follow. Groundbreaking research will be honoured and reputations cemented for posterity, but the winners will also find themselves considerably better off – and by rather more than Hemingway’s $35,000.

How do Nobel laureates spend their winnings – a sum that fluctuates with the investment value of Alfred Nobel’s capital, but is currently worth 8m Swedish kronor (£720,000)? It would be insulting to suggest of distinguished laureates, who have spent a lifetime in a determined quest for knowledge or excellence, that the principal value of a Nobel prize is monetary. And yet, as Phillip Sharp, the American winner of the 1993 prize for medicine, said of the historic house he bought with his prize, a Nobel prize may be principally about honour, but “the money is a nice part of the process”.

For some laureates, the cash does indeed allow no small amount of fun. When Sir Paul Nurse, now director of the Francis Crick Institute, won his prize in medicine in 2001, he treated himself to a Kawasaki GPZ motorbike (later upgraded to a Triumph Bonneville, a colleague confirmed this week – though reports there was also a private plane are false, she said). Franco Modigliani, who claimed the economics prize in 1985, promised not to “go on a binge” with his prize, but later used some of his prize to upgrade his laser-class yacht. Richard Roberts, the US-based British joint winner of the 1993 prize, spent some of his winnings on a 740-sq-metre (8,000-sq-ft) croquet lawn at his house (on which he would later pose for 1997’s “Studmuffins of Science” calendar).

Albert Camus (literature, 1957) bought a house in the south of France where he could work. Eugene O’Neill (literature, 1936), used the money to build an Asian-style house in California where he would write some of his best-known plays.

For many others, however, after a career in modestly rewarded academic research or literature, the money represents something more prosaic, if no less welcome. Asked what winning the 2004 literature prize meant to her, the Austrian novelist Elfriede Jelinek said: “Financial independence, of course.”

The Scottish-born, US-based economist Sir Angus Deaton, who won the prize in economics last year for his research into inequality, has also examined the link between money and contentment. So how did he spend the cash? “I have worked on trying to understand spending and saving all of my professional life,” he said, “and while there is much that I still don’t understand, one of the things we learn is that it makes no sense to spend a once-and-for-all windfall. So I saved it, after I’d paid a lot of tax on it.” Unlike many countries, the US taxes Nobel prize winnings as ordinary income. Deaton had just retired to Princeton, and added the sum remaining to his retirement fund. “So I shall spend it over the next however many years.”

“You have to remember that I shared my award,” said Sir John Walker, who jointly won the chemistry prize in 1997, “so even though it sounds like a colossal amount of money, it isn’t. At that time, my children were approaching university. It certainly helped remove any concerns I might have had about supporting their education at undergraduate and graduate level.”

For many others, like Marie Curie (physics, 1903), winning a Nobel allows them to pursue further research. Others, particularly winners of the peace prize, choose to support causes close to their hearts. Barack Obama, for instance, gave his 2009 award to what the LA Times called “an almost perfectly balanced list of PC beneficiaries” including veterans’ groups, diversity college programmes and relief charities.

Mother Teresa (peace, 1979), Nadine Gordimer (literature, 1991), Wole Soyinka (literature, 1986) and many others also endowed cherished causes. Günter Blobel (medicine, 1999), who as a child had witnessed the bombing of Dresden, gave his entire prize to the city to fund a new synagogue and the restoration of its cathedral.

Less loftily, Samuel Beckett (literature, 1969), who did not think much of the award, divided the cash between his hard-up friends. And though hardly a charitable cause, Albert Einstein’s decision to give his ex-wife his Nobel winnings is notable because he left the money to Mileva Marić when they divorced in 1919, two years before he actually won the physics award in 1921.

Nobel laureates do not receive their financial awards during the presentation ceremony in Stockholm. In fact, even the 18-carat engraved gold medal and diploma they are given by the king of Sweden are immediately handed back, said Lars Heikenstein, executive director of the Nobel Foundation, “because we have a big party that night, with a banquet and dancing”.

The next morning, when they are often rather tired, “they come to my office, one after the other, and they get the medals and diplomas back and get a chance to sit in Alfred Nobel’s chair and sign the guest book – if they are physicists they can see Einstein’s name for example – so it’s a rather moving moment. And then, we basically talk a little bit about how they want their money.”

For most, this will be via simple bank transfer, though some laureates ask for payment in instalments, to spread across two tax years, he said. All of the money must be collected within a year.

For Sir Andre Geim, who with Sir Konstantin Novoselov won the 2010 physics prize for their discovery of graphene at Manchester university, the subject of the financial aspect of the award is a provocative one. “I don’t know any Nobel laureate who considers the monetary aspect of the prize to be worth even mentioning,” he said. “However, I have met a few people who would sell their soul, leaving aside a granny or fortune, for the prize.”

The money, he said, “is not important to any of us. But as with any award, it is better to have your medal in real gold than gold-painted.”

• This article was amended on 3 October 2016 to correct Nobel’s first name. He was Alfred, not Albert.

Contributor

Esther Addley

The GuardianTramp

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