And in 2010, Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet published the name of the medicine winner in advance. The literature prize, in a particular, was plagued by leaks in recent decades. It is not the first time the names of winners slip out before the Nobel announcements. The academy stopped the practice since the awards were being announced simultaneously on the digital platforms of the Nobel Prizes. The courier would be connected to the academy by phone and wait for a cue to hand over the envelope at the moment the prize committee started reading the names of the winners.
Until just under a decade ago, the academy sent a courier to AP and other news agencies carrying an envelope with the names of the winners. “But in the electronic era the leaks can occur in different ways than in the newspaper era.” “It is an important principle that the prize winners are the first to find out, and that everyone else finds out afterward at the same time,” the former head of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Göran Hansson, told news agency TT.
