LONDON, Oct 17, 2007 (AFP) - Irishwoman Anne Enright was awarded the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, one of the literary world's most prestigious awards, for her family epic 'The Gathering' on Tuesday.

The 45-year-old beat favourites Ian McEwan, who won the award in 1998, and Lloyd Jones to the 50,000-pound (72,000-euro, 102,000-dollar) prize, awarded to the best work of fiction by an author from the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland.

STOCKHOLM, Oct 15, 2007 (AFP) - US trio Leonid Hurwicz, Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson won the 2007 Nobel Economics Prize on Monday for 'having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory,' the Nobel jury said.

The jury said the theory -- initiated by Hurwicz, and further developed by Maskin and Myerson -- had helped economists 'identify efficient trading mechanisms, regulation schemes and voting procedures'.

GENEVA, Oct 12, 2007 (AFP) - Environmental group WWF on Friday said the joint Nobel peace prize awarded to former US vice president Al Gore and the UN's panel of climate change scientists was recognition of 'the world's major challenge of the early 21st century.'

'The award of this Nobel Peace Price is clear recognition for the growing global movement to stop climate change,' Hans Verolme, Director of WWF International's Climate Change Programme, said in a statement.

NAIROBI, Oct 12, 2007 (AFP) - The Nobel Peace Prize award to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and former US vice president Al Gore on Friday showed that combating global warming was key to peace and security, a UN environment chief said.

UN Environment Programme chief Achim Steiner said both the IPCC and Gore have hugely contributed to highlighting climate change.

'The Nobel Peace Prize Committee has today made it clear that combating climate change is a central peace and security policy for the 21st century,' Steiner said in a statememt.

OSLO, Oct 12, 2007 (AFP) - The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was jointly awarded here Friday to former US vice president Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Norwegian Nobel committee said.

Gore, a vice president to Bill Clinton and failed candidate for the White House in 2000, has reinvented himself as a champion of climate change with his 2006 Oscar-winning documentary 'An Inconvenient Truth'.

FRANKFURT, Oct 11, 2003 (AFP) - Doris Lessing's editor, publishers and fellow authors said here Thursday they were thrilled that a great writer in her late eighties who still writes by hand had won the Nobel Literature Prize at last.

'It is wonderful; of course we did not expect it and Doris certainly did not,' said Nicholas Pearson, her editor at publishing house Harper Collins' Fourth Estate division.

FRANKFURT, Oct 11, 2003 (AFP) - Italian author Umberto Eco, who was seen as having an outside chance of winning the Nobel Literature Prize on Thursday, said Doris Lessing richly deserved scooping the prize.

'She absolutely deserves it,' the author of 'The Name of the Rose' told AFP at the Frankfurt Book Fair after the Swedish Academy announced the winner.

'I am very happy, though not as happy as she is,' he added.

STOCKHOLM, Oct 11, 2007 (AFP) - British author Doris Lessing won the 2007 Nobel Literature Prize on Thursday, the Swedish Academy announced.

The jury described Lessing, 87, as 'that epicist of the female experience who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny.'

BERLIN, Oct 10, 2007 (AFP) - Gerhard Ertl of Germany said he got the news that he won the Nobel Chemistry Prize Wednesday at his office in Berlin, where he was hard at work although it was his 71st birthday.

'I was speechless at first when I got the news from Stockholm,' he told AFP. 'Mainly I feel proud.'

Ertl, the director emeritus of Berlin's Fritz Haber Institute, which is part of the Max Planck Society, said the honour had been a once-in-a-lifetime birthday present.

'I can't say I expected the prize but I knew I was on the list of candidates,' he said.

BERLIN, Oct 10, 2007 (AFP) - Gerhard Ertl of Germany got the news that he won the Nobel Chemistry Prize Wednesday at his office in Berlin, where he was hard at work even though it was his 71st birthday.

'I was speechless at first when I got the news from Stockholm,' he told AFP. 'Mainly I feel proud.'

Ertl, the director emeritus of Berlin's Fritz Haber Institute, which is part of the Max Planck Society, said the honour had been a once-in-a-lifetime birthday present.

'I can't say I expected the prize but I knew I was on the list of candidates,' he said.

STOCKHOLM, Oct 10, 2007 (AFP) - Gerhard Ertl of Germany won the Nobel Chemistry Prize on Wednesday, his 71st birthday, for pioneering work in surface chemistry that has become invaluable to industry, from fertilizers to cleaner cars.

'This science is important for the chemical industry and can help us to understand such varied processes as why iron rusts, how fuel cells function and how the catalysts in our cars work,' the jury said in its citation.

STOCKHOLM, Oct 10, 2007 (AFP) - Gerhard Ertl of Germany won the 2007 Nobel Chemistry Prize on Wednesday for his studies of chemical processes on solid surfaces, the Nobel jury said.

'This science is important for the chemical industry and can help us to understand such varied processes as why iron rusts, how fuel cells function and how the catalysts in our cars work,' the jury said in its citation.

PARIS, Oct 9, 2007 (AFP) - Over the past decade, hard drives have shrunk to the size of postage stamps while their storage capacity has improved fifty-fold, a feat that can be traced to two men who won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Physics on Tuesday.

From MP3 players to cameras to laptops, most of the gadgets that store the digital threads from which our daily lives are increasingly woven owe their enhanced power to this hard-disk breakthrough.

STOCKHOLM, Oct 9, 2007 (AFP) - Albert Fert of France and Peter Gruenberg of Germany on Tuesday won the Nobel Physics Prize for work that led to the miniaturised hard disk, one of the breakthroughs of modern information technology.

Fert, 69 and Gruenberg, 68, were lauded for discovering a principle called giant magnetoresistance, or GMR.

GMR can 'be considered one of the first real application of the promising field of nanotechnology,' the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in its citation.

STOCKHOLM, Oct 9, 2007 (AFP) - Albert Fert of France and Peter Gruenberg of Germany on Tuesday won the Nobel Physics Prize for the discovery of giant magnetoresistance, technology used to read data on hard disks, the Nobel committee said.

The technology has made it 'possible to miniaturize hard disks so radically in recent years,' the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

STOCKHOLM, Oct 8, 2007 (AFP) - Mario Capecchi and Oliver Smithies of the United States and Martin Evans of Britain won the Nobel Medicine Prize on Monday for their work in creating 'knockout mice,' the 21st-century testbed for biomedical research.

The trio were honoured for discovering how to genetically manipulate mouse embryonic stem cells, leading to lab rodents that replicate human disease, the Nobel jury said in its citation.

STOCKHOLM, Oct 8, 2007 (AFP) - Two US scientists, Mario Capecchi and Oliver Smithies, and Martin Evans of Britain on Monday won the Nobel Medicine Prize for their work in embryonic stem cell research, the Nobel jury said.

They were honoured for their discoveries of 'principles for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells,' the Nobel citation said.

STOCKHOLM, Oct 2, 2007 (AFP) - The Right Livelihood prize, an annual 'alternative' to the Nobel prizes, was awarded Tuesday to peace and environmental activists from Sri Lanka Lanka, Kenya, Canada and Bangladesh.

The two million Swedish kronor (310,000 dollars/220,000 euros) prize will be shared by Christopher Weeramantry of Sri Lanka Lanka for 'his lifetime of groundbreaking work to strengthen and expand the rule of international law' and Dekha Ibrahim Abdi from Kenya for her 'effective peace work and conflict resolution' in many divided countries.

STRASBOURG, Sept 25, 2007 (AFP) - Euro MPs have named three finalists for the 2007 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought; slain Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a Chinese dissident couple and a Sudanese lawyer.

The nominations for the prize, awarded for the last two decades to individuals or groups who made a stand in favour of human rights, were decided at a meeting of the parliament's foreign affairs and development committees in Strasbourg.

The winner will be decided on October 25 by the presidents of the European parliament's political groups.

LONDON, Sept 24, 2007 (AFP) - Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser Al-Missned, the consort of the Emir of Qatar, has won the Chatham House Prize for improving international relations, the foreign policy think-tank announced Monday.

The prestigious annual award is given to a leading international statesperson deemed to have made the most significant contribution to the improvement of international relations in the previous year.

Sheikha Mozah chairs the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development.

OSLO, Sept 20, 2007 (AFP) - An Indian group fighting for the rights of some 167 million people oppressed because of caste prejudice on Thursday won the Rafto human rights prize.

The National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR) was honoured 'for its efforts to emphasise that the discrimination and oppression resulting from caste prejudice is a serious violation of international human rights,' the Norwegian-based Rafto Foundation said.

OSLO, Sept 20, 2007 (AFP) - An Indian group fighting for the rights of some 167 million people oppressed because of caste prejudice on Thursday won the Norwegian Rafto human rights prize.

The National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR) was honoured 'for its efforts to emphasise that the discrimination and oppression resulting from caste prejudice is a serious violation of international human rights,' the Rafto Foundation said.

STOCKHOLM, Sept 19, 2007 (AFP) - Rowdy bars may no longer be quite as dangerous thanks to a British professor who won a criminology prize on Wednesday for his work showing how injuries from broken glass can be reduced.

Jonathan Shepherd, a face surgeon and professor at Cardiff University, won the Stockholm Prize in Criminology with his research into bar fights and glass-related injuries.

LONDON, Sept 6, 2007 (AFP) - Ian McEwan headlined the six-author shortlist announced on Thursday for the prestigious Man Booker Prize, one of the literary world's most important awards.

McEwan, who won the award with his 1998 novel, 'Amsterdam', was made the 6-4 favourite by bookmakers Ladbrokes, though the length of his latest book, 'On Chesil Beach' -- or lack thereof, it is 176 pages long -- raised some eyebrows.

LONDON, Sept 4, 2007 (AFP) - The Klaxons scored a shock upset by winning Britain's prestigious Mercury Prize on Tuesday, beating out favourites Amy Winehouse and the Arctic Monkeys.

The band, a three-piece group from London that have only been together for a couple of years, won the 20,000-pound (29,600-euro, 40,300-dollar) award with their debut album 'Myths of the Near Future'.

STOCKHOLM, Aug 17, 2007 (AFP) - The 2007 Nobel prizes will be announced between October 8 and 15, the Nobel Foundation said Friday, with former US vice president Al Gore, a Canadian Inuit and Bolivia's president in the running for the peace prize.

The peace prize, the most celebrated of the Nobel honours, will be announced on October 12 in Oslo by the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

LOS ANGELES, Aug 14, 2007 (AFP) - A Senegalese educational group fighting the tradition of female genital mutilation in Africa won a 1.5-million prize from the Conrad Hilton humanitarian foundation, the fund said Tuesday.

The independent foundation awarded its annual Conrad Hilton Humanitarian Prize to Tostan, a group which educates people about the harmful practice, plus other social and health issues.

LOS ANGELES, Aug 14, 2007 (AFP) - A Senegalese educational group fighting the tradition of female genital mutilation in Africa won a 1.5-million prize from the Conrad Hilton humanitarian foundation, the fund said Tuesday.

The independent foundation awarded its annual Conrad Hilton Humanitarian Prize to Tostan, a group which educates people about the harmful practice, plus other social and health issues.