Malala Yousafzai

The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced just three weeks before world leaders gather for a climate summit that scientists say could determine the future of the planet, one reason why prize watchers say this could be the year of Greta Thunberg.

Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny was nominated on Monday (27 September) for the European Parliament's annual human rights prize as European Union lawmakers sought to keep the public spotlight on his pro-democracy network, which has been banned in Russia.

With the announcement of the Nobel Prize winner in medicine, the unusual season of 2019 begins, in which two literature recipients will also be awarded and during the speculations that Greta Thunberg may be grabbing the Peace Prize.

The first prize is already announced.

Nobel peace laureate Malala Yousafzai, who was shot by the Taliban for advocating education for girls in her native Pakistan, announced on Aug. 17 she has won a place to study at Oxford University.

Malala Yousafzai, the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, celebrated her 18th birthday in Lebanon on July 12 by opening a school for Syrian refugee girls and called on world leaders to invest in "books not bullets". 

Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai on June 8 urged Myanmar leaders to take "immediate action" to prevent the persecution of the country's Rohingya Muslims, most of whom are considered by the government to be illegal immigrants.

A court in Pakistan April 30 sentenced 10 men to life imprisonment for attempting to kill Nobel-prize winning teenage activist Malala Yousafzai in 2012, officials said, though the chief suspect remains at large.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned a deadly Taliban attack on a Pakistan school on Tuesday as "an act of horror and rank cowardice to attack defenseless children while they learn."
   

Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai, shot by the Taliban for refusing to quit school, and Indian activist Kailash Satyarthi received their Nobel Peace Prizes on Dec. 10 after two days of celebration honouring their work for children's rights.
  

Malala Yousafzai, the global icon of children's rights who survived a near fatal Taliban gun attack, becomes the youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate on Wednesday, adding yet another distinction to a long list.