Holberg Prize

Info

The Holberg Prize is awarded annually for outstanding scholarly work within the humanities, social sciences, law and theology.

Historie

The Holberg Prize is awarded annually to a scholar who have made outstanding contributions to research within the humanities, social sciences, law and theology, either within one field or through interdisciplinary work. The price worth is NOK 4.5 million.

The Nils Klim Prize is awarded to young Nordic scholars under 35 years within the academic fields of the Holberg Prize. The price worth is NOK 300 000.

The Holberg Prize School Project is a national research competition for students in upper secondary schools. 12 schools participate each year, and the three best entries are rewarded with NOK 25 000, NOK 15 000 and NOK 10 000 respectively.

The Holberg Prize was established by the Norwegian Parliament 1 July 2003, and awarded for the first time in 2004. The objective of the prize is to increase awareness of the value of academic scholarship within the aforementioned fields.

The prize is named after the Danish-Norwegian writer Ludvig Holberg, who excelled in all of the disciplines covered by the award. Holberg played a crucial role in bringing the Enlightenment to the Nordic countries and in the modernization of several academic disciplines and teaching methods. Today he is perhaps best known as a playwright and an author, and several of his works are translated into a number of languages.

The Nils Klim Prize is named after the hero of Holberg’s utopian novel Nils Klim’s Subterranean Journey from 1741.

"The Holberg Prize was established by the Norwegian Parliament 1 July 2003, and was awarded for the first time in 2004. The objective of the prize is to increase awareness of the value of academic scholarship in the arts,humanities, social sciences, law and theology. The Prize has a money value of NOK 6 000,000. The Prize is named after the Danish-Norwegian writer Ludvig Holberg, who excelled in all of the sciences covered by the award."