The Nobel Prizes are arguably the world’s most prestigious recognition anyone can receive for their work in the sciences, medicine, literature, or for world peace. For most winners, getting the call to tell them they won marks the high point of their lives. Note that I said most.
Not all are so joyful. Some just don’t seem that bothered. Others seem downright irritated.
In fact, one of this year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in Medicine, Fred Ramsdell, conveniently decided to go “off the grid” and spend his time “living his best life” somewhere in the mountains of Idaho—right in time for the prizes to be announced. (He eventually found out 12 hours after he won—and on hearing the news, his first reaction was to dismiss the idea outright. At least he didn’t feel actively enraged, unlike some other Nobel laureates…)
So, as we continue to learn about this year’s Nobel laureates, we’re looking back at some of the most unorthodox reactions from Nobel laureates, from the brutally indifferent to the surprisingly relatable.
1. Is this a scam?
Many a Nobel winner has assumed that a call from an unknown Swedish number is a phishing scam (honestly, who wouldn’t think this?). That’s what happened to Mary Brunkow, who shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine with Ramsdell. She thought that the Nobel call was “just spam of some sort, so I disabled the phone and went back to sleep,” she said in an interview with the Nobel Committee.
Brunkow is far from alone. Paul Romer, winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics “for integrating technological innovations into long-run macroeconomic analysis,” also let the Nobel call go to voicemail several times before thinking that maybe this persistent caller must be contacting him for something important.
Others were less easily persuaded. Abdulrazak Gurnah won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents,” but it took some convincing for Gurnah to believe it wasn’t a scam.
“I was making a cup of tea and I thought it was a scam call.” Novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah tells the BBC how he found out he was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature. In his novels, @GurnahAuthor explores the themes of colonisation, migration and the immigrant experience. pic.twitter.com/4ZwWeFwXPk — BBC News Africa (@BBCAfrica) October 8, 2021
“This guy said, ‘Hello, you have won the Nobel Prize for Literature,’ and I said, ‘Come on, get out of here. Leave me alone,’” Gurnah told the BBC at the time. “He talked me out of that and gradually persuaded me.”
2. Now’s not a good time
Adam Smith, chief scientific officer at Nobel Prize Outreach, told the BBC that Nobel physics laureates Konstantin Novoselov (2010, discovery of graphene) and Arthur Ashkin (2018, optical tweezers) were “disgruntled” upon hearing the news that they had won, because it had interrupted their day. Smith recalls them telling him: “You mean I have to stop my experiment? I’m kind of busy.”
When Linda Buck won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her work on the biology of smell, she was asleep. So the director of the research center she was affiliated with answered the all-important phone call at 2 a.m. local time.
The director, believing that the call was from a job applicant with limited understanding of time zones, grumpily told the voice on the other end of the phone that this kind of behavior would not land them a position. When Smith told him the real reason he was calling, the director reportedly exclaimed, “That will get you a job here!”
3. And then there is Bob Dylan
Speaking of people who win a Nobel at apparently inconvenient moments, when the legendary singer-songwriter won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition,” he just… wasn’t around to hear the news.
It took the Nobel Committee more than two weeks just to get Dylan on the phone. At the time, the Swedish Academy’s administrative director, Odd Zchiedrich, admitted to CNN that they “have stopped trying—we said everything we needed to his manager and friend, he knows about us being eager having confirmation from him, but we haven’t heard anything back.”
The decision to award the prize to Dylan sparked some controversy among literary communities, and while Dylan himself seemed extremely unenthused at first, he later accepted the prize, saying he was “speechless” and honored. And then, perhaps not shockingly, he skipped the award ceremony due to “pre-existing commitments.”
4. Doris Lessing gave a lesson on exasperation
British novelist Doris Lessing was out shopping when the Swedish Academy awarded her the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature, describing her as “that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire, and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny.”
When informed of the good news, Lessing, however, just wanted to get on with it and go home. We’ve picked out some choice moments from the interaction, but the video of her winning is seriously worth watching in its entirety.
“Oh, Christ,” Lessing said in exasperation, as reporters delivered the news. “Right, I’m sure you’d like some uplifting remarks of some kind.”
“But this is a recognition of your life’s work,” a reporter insisted.
Lessing responds: “What do you think I should say? Look, you tell me what to say and I’ll say it.”
Finally, when asked if the prize meant anything to her, she said, sounding extremely exasperated, “I’ve won all the prizes in Europe—every bloody one. So I’m delighted to win them all. It’s a royal flush. Okay.”
All fun aside, Smith later told the BBC that Lessing was far less “dismissive” in their conversations, and was happy about the recognition.
5. Peter Higgs went into hiding
On occasion, a renowned scientist has a premonition that their Nobel is coming down the pike, and they want nothing to do with it. And so it was with Peter Higgs, the physicist awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles.” He shared the prize with François Englert.
In 1964, Higgs and Englert formulated a theory about an invisible field with zero mass or charge that gives any particle its mass, a concept that became known as the Higgs boson. When CERN successfully confirmed the existence of the boson, the eponymous physicist went into hiding—literally.
On the day the prize was due to be announced, Higgs hid in a pub (with a “rather remarkable range of good beers,” as he told The Telegraph) so as to evade the eye of the Swedish Academy and excited journalists. His phone was also switched off, and the physicist was eventually alerted to the news from a woman in the street.
Higgs admitted to physicist Frank Close, who wrote a book describing Higgs’s research, that the discovery of the boson “ruined” his life. “My relatively peaceful existence was ending,” Higgs said, adding that his “style is to work in isolation and occasionally have a bright idea.”
Still, Higgs remained sanguine. “I am obviously delighted and rather relieved that it is all over, as it has been a long time coming,” Higgs told The Telegraph.