Nobel Prize winners usually attend a royal banquet inside the glittering Stockholm City Hall, where they accept their awards from the king and rub shoulders with other dignitaries and laureates.
But most of this year’s awards are being given out in scaled-down ceremonies this week in the laureates’ home countries. For the second year running, the pandemic has disrupted the festivities.
On Monday, the author Abdulrazak Gurnah was the first to receive his award, the Nobel Prize in Literature, in a ceremony at the Swedish ambassador’s residence in London.
“Customarily you would receive the prize from the hands of His Majesty, the king of Sweden,” Ambassador Mikaela Kumlin Granitshe told Gurnah, according to the Associated Press. “However, this year you will be celebrated with a distance forced upon us because of the pandemic.”
The award comes with a gold medal, a diploma and more than $1 million in prize money.