2026 Nobel Prizes Close With Economics Award for Hall and Woodford

The final 2026 Nobel Prize went Monday to American economists Robert E. Hall and Michael Woodford, who were honored for building models that help governments and central banks navigate economic swings such as energy crises and inflation. Their research laid theoretical groundwork for understanding how consumers choose between saving and spending, giving policymakers tools to steady economies after major disruptions. The economics award, formally the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, closed out this year's announcements.

The awards will be presented on Dec. 10, the date Alfred Nobel died, and each prize carries 12 million Swedish kronor — roughly $1.2 million — regardless of whether it goes to one person, a small group or an organization, the Nobel Foundation said.

The peace prize went to Navi Pillay, a South African-born jurist and former U.N. human rights chief, for work the award committee said advanced international law at a time when it is under attack. According to the Associated Press, her selection was widely expected to be read as a rebuke to U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, both of whom have rejected findings from the U.N. commission she led on Gaza. Hours after the announcement in Norway, the Trump administration imposed sweeping new sanctions on the International Criminal Court, and Trump — who has long sought the peace prize — criticized the committee's decision. In an AP interview Monday, Pillay called Washington's attacks on the ICC “completely unlawful” and described them as “negative and cruel.”

Canada's Anne Carson won the literature prize for what the committee called “bold and inventive” writing that merges classical and modern influences and crosses the line between poetry and prose. The Toronto-born poet, essayist and translator is 76 and has drawn on Greek and Roman literature, contemporary sources and personal experience, producing work that ranges from translations of ancient poets to collaborations with dancers and musicians.

In chemistry, Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai were recognized for work on molecules that exist as mirror-image versions of one another, akin to left and right hands. They devised ways to steer reactions toward producing a chosen mirror image, an advance that has been used in developing numerous drugs and reshaped modern medicine.

The physics prize went to Belgian-born scientist Francis Halzen for helping to explain a rare class of neutrinos — chargeless, extremely low-mass cosmic particles that researchers think hold clues to the universe's evolution. Because the particles cannot be observed directly, scientists study what happens when they strike other matter, and Halzen proposed using Antarctic ice as a vast detector for those collisions. In medicine, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel were honored for research that created optogenetics, a technique combining light and genes to turn neurons on and off in living brains.