Our Nobel Laureates

Seven academics or former students have been recognised by the Nobel Foundation.

Professor Richard Synge (UEA)
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1952
Professorship in Biological Sciences from 1968 to 1984
Awarded jointly with Archer John Porter Martin “for their invention of partition chromatography.”

Óscar Arias (Essex)
Nobel Peace Prize 1987
Completed his doctorate in Political Science in 1973
Arias Sánchez received the prize “for his work for peace in Central America, efforts which led to the accord signed in Guatemala.”

Derek Walcott (Essex)
Nobel Prize in Literature 1992
Professor of Poetry from 2010 to 2013
Awarded to Walcott “for a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment.”

Sir Paul Nurse (UEA)
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2001
Completed his doctorate in 1973
Nurse received the prize jointly with Leland H. Hartwell and Tim Hunt “for their discoveries of key regulators of the cell cycle.”

Christopher A. Pissarides (Essex)
Nobel Prize in Economics 2010
Completed his BA and MA in Economics in the early 1970s
Pissarides received the prize jointly with Peter A. Diamond and Dale T. Mortensen “for their analysis of markets with search frictions.”

Sir Kazuo Ishiguro (Kent and UEA)
Nobel Prize in Literature 2017
BA from Kent in 1978; MA from UEA in 1980
Awarded to Ishiguro “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.”

Abdulrazak Gurnah (Kent)
Nobel Prize in Literature 2021
MA and PhD (1982), and professor of English and postcolonial literature until 2017
Awarded to Gurnah “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”