Can a Nobel Prize Be Gifted or Sold?

January 16, 2026 6:49 PM EST

Nobel Prizes are not transferable. But that hasn’t stopped a number of recipients or their family members from donating, selling, or—in some cases—trying and failing to sell their medals over the years.

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado became the latest of the prestigious awards’ winners to join that list on Thursday, gifting her 2025 Nobel Peace Prize medal to President Donald Trump while meeting with him at the White House in the wake of U.S. forces capturing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Machado told Fox News that she gave the medal to Trump, who has long coveted the Peace prize and openly campaigned for it before it was awarded to the Venezuelan opposition leader, because “he deserves it.”

"I decided to present the Nobel Peace Prize medal on behalf of the people of Venezuela," she said.

The move has drawn criticism from some politicians in Norway, where the prize is awarded. The Nobel committee itself clarified that "the Nobel Prize and the laureate are inseparable.”

“Regardless of what may happen to the medal, the diploma, or the prize money, it is and remains the original laureate who is recorded in history as the recipient of the prize,” the Nobel committee wrote in a pointedly timed Friday press release. “Even if the medal or diploma later comes into someone else’s possession, this does not alter who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”

Here are some other notable recipients of the Nobel Prize who decided not to keep their medals—and what they did with them, or tried to.

Dmitry Muratov (Peace)

The Russian journalist won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for fighting for press freedom and standing up to Russian authorities.

He sold his medal the following year at auction for $103.5 million, which he gave to UNICEF’s fund for Ukrainian refugee children. This is the highest price ever paid for a Nobel Prize medal.

Kofi Annan (Peace)

The former secretary-general of the United Nations was a co-recipient of the Peace prize in 2001. He was given the honor for his prioritization of human rights and for “his commitment to the struggle to contain the spreading of the HIV virus in Africa and his declared opposition to international terrorism,” according to the Nobel Foundation.

Following Annan’s death in 2018, his widow, Nane Annan, donated his medal in 2024 to the United Nations’ office in Geneva so that, she said, his legacy could continue inspiring future generations. The medal remains on permanent display there.

Christian Lous Lange (Peace)

Lange, Norway’s first Nobel Peace Prize laureate, received the honor in 1921 along with the Swede Hjalmar Branting for what the committee described as “their lifelong contributions to the cause of peace and organized internationalism.”

Both Lange and Branting “wanted to strengthen the new world organization the League of Nations,” according to the Nobel Foundation. Branting was Sweden’s Prime Minister at the time they were awarded the prize, while Lange became secretary-general of the Inter-Parliamentary Union—an international organization of national parliaments—in 1909 and managed the organization through the first World War. Lange later went on to become a member of the Nobel Committee in 1934.

The Lange family has loaned the prize to the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, where it has been since 2005. It is the only original peace prize permanently on public display in Norway.

Carlos Saavedra Lamas (Peace)

The foreign minister of Argentina received the Peace prize in 1936 for his part in ending the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay. His medal was sold at auction for $1.1 million to a private Asian buyer. The estate of another private collector in New York, who had owned it for roughly a decade, made the sale.

James Watson and Francis Crick (Medicine)

Watson and Crick, along with Maurice Wilkins, were awarded the 1962 prize in Medicine for discovering the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953, a breakthrough that propelled the field of molecular biology.

The medal awarded to Crick, who died in 2004, was sold at auction by his heirs for $2 million in 2013 to Shanghai biotech executive Jack Wang.

Watson sold his own medal the following year for $4.76 million to Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov, who later gave the prize back to the laureate. Watson died last year on Nov. 6.

William Faulkner (Literature)

The author, known for modernist Southern Gothic classics including The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, won the Literature prize in 1949 for what the committee described as “his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel." His medal went up for auction in 2016, but failed to sell: Bidding came to a stop at $425,000, failing to reach the minimum bid.

Knut Hamsun (Literature)

The current location of Hamsun’s medal is unknown. The winner of the 1920 Literature prize—a Norwegian writer who received the award for Growth of the Soil, a 1917 novel that tells the story of a man settling and cultivating a farm in rural Norway that the Nobel committee called a “monumental work”—sold his medal to German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels as a gesture of thanks after meeting with him in 1943.

Leon Lederman (Physics)

Lederman, who was a co-recipient of the Physics prize in 1988 for the discovery of a second type of neutrino, sold his medal in 2015 for $765,002 to cover medical expenses to treat his dementia.

David Thouless (Physics)

Thouless won the Physics prize in 2016 alongside two other British scientists for using a branch of mathematics known as topology to explain what happens when matter changes phases. His family donated the medal to Trinity Hall at the University of Cambridge, where it is displayed for students.

Can a Nobel Prize Be Gifted or Sold? Venezuela’s Machado Isn’t the First Winner to Give Their Medal Away