Nobel Winners Hard to Reach, Notified Via Twitter, Neighbors, Voicemail

By Colleen Curry October 11, 2013

The Nobel Prize committees had a tough time getting in touch with winners of the Literature, Physics and Peace prizes this year. It seems that no one picks up their phones anymore.

The prize committee attempted to reach the Netherlands-based Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons this morning to inform the group that it had won the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize but, apparently, had trouble getting through to the group. The committee in Oslo, Norway, went ahead and announced that OPCW had won the $1.2 million prize, anyway.

The committee had a similar problem Thursday with Nobel Prize in Literature winner Alice Munro, the Canadian author and famed short-story writer who lives in Clinton, Ontario.

The Nobel Prize organization said Thursday morning that "The Swedish Academy has not been able to get a hold of Alice Munro, left a phone message."

Eventually they were able to contact Munro.

The previous day, the Nobel Prize winner in Physics was out to lunch when the committee made their announcement that he had won.

Peter Higgs, renowned for his work on the Higgs boson particle, told the U.K. paper The Telegraph that he was out to a lunch of soup, beer and sea trout in Edinburgh, Scotland, when the announcement was made.

"As I was walking, a car pulled up across the road and a lady in her 60s or 70s got out and introduced herself as a former neighbor, a widow of a judge who died recently, and congratulated me on the news," he told the Telegraph.

"I said, 'What news?' and she told me that her daughter had phoned from London to alert her to the fact that I had got this prize," he said.

Canadian author Alice Munro has won this year's Nobel Prize in literature, and Professor Peter Higgs won the Nobel Prize in physics for helping to explain how matter formed after the Big Bang. (AP Photo)