( AFP ) - The 2007 Nobel prize season kicks off Monday with the announcement of the medicine prize and runs through next Monday, with the fight against climate change tipped for the prestigious Peace Prize.
As is tradition, the Nobel prize committees are keeping mum ahead of the much-awaited announcements, leaving observers to engage in a wild guessing game.
Americans tend to dominate the science prizes and last year they made a clean sweep, taking the medicine, physics, chemistry and economics awards.
Monday's medicine prize was to be announced at 0930 GMT at the earliest.
For the peace prize, to be announced in Oslo on Friday, a total of 181 individuals and organisations are known to have been nominated.
The battle against global warming is seen as a strong candidate for the prestigious award, with former US vice president Al Gore and Canadian Inuit Sheila Watt-Cloutier believed to be contenders.
Gore has brought the issue to the top of the international agenda with his 2006 film "An Inconvenient Truth," while Watt-Cloutier, the former head of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, has campaigned to draw attention to climate change in the Arctic.
Climate change has a direct impact on world peace, according to observers who note that humanitarian efforts around the world will amount to nothing if low-lying countries are wiped out by rising sea levels and massive waves of refugees storm into others.Last year, the honours went to Bangladeshi microcredit pioneer Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank.
For the Nobel Literature Prize, to be announced on Thursday, the guessing game is in full swing, with Stockholm's literary circles divided over whether the Swedish Academy will go with a dark horse or a favourite.
On Ladbrokes' online betting site -- which last year correctly had Orhan Pamuk of Turkey as the winner -- US author Philip Roth is in top spot with 5-to-1 odds, followed by Italian novelist and essayist Claudio Magris and Australian poet Les Murray.
Lesser-known writers such as French poet Maryse Conde or Estonian author and poet Jaan Kaplinski are mentioned as possible laureates, while big names cited include US author Don DeLillo and Syrian poet Adonis, the pseudonym for Ali Ahmad Said.
Others making the rounds are Japan's Haruki Murakami, Italy's Antonio Tabucchi, Amos Oz of Israel, South Korean poet Ko Un and Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes.
The physics prize is to be announced on Tuesday followed by the chemistry prize on Wednesday. The economics prize will wrap up the awards on October 15.
The Nobel prizes, founded by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, were first awarded in 1901.
Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, died childless in 1896, dedicating his vast fortune to create "prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind."
Laureates receive a gold medal, a diploma and 10 million Swedish kronor (1.53 million dollars, 1.08 million euros) which can be split between up to three winners per prize.