As always, speculation is rife for those honours, to be announced on Thursday and Friday respectively, though no obvious candidates have emerged amid the annual buzz.
First out is the Medicine Prize, with the laureate to be revealed on Monday around 0930 GMT by the Nobel jury at Stockholm´s Karolinska Institute.
The award committees for the various prizes never reveal the nominees, leaving the door wide open for frenzied speculation in the weeks prior to the announcements.
Some names that have circulated in the Swedish and international media for the Medicine Prize this year are Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak of the United States.
The trio won the 2006 Lasker Prize for predicting and discovering an enzyme called telomerase, which helps chromosomes in cells stay eternally young and which has drawn interest from researchers studying its role in everything from ageing to cancer.
Their work borders however on chemistry and they could also be honoured with the Nobel Chemistry Prize, to be announced on Wednesday.
Others mentioned for Monday´s distinction include US scientist Margaret Liu for her work on DNA vaccines which help an individual´s immune system fight disease, as well as Shinya Yamanaka of Japan, who won the 2009 Lasker Prize for stem cell research that involves reprogramming adult cells to behave as stem cells.
Last year, the Nobel Medicine Prize went to France´s Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier, who shared one half of the award, for discovering the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS.
Harald zur Hausen of Germany won the other half for research that went against the then-current dogma to claim that a virus, the human papillomavirus (HPV), causes cervical cancer, the second most common cancer among women.
The announcement of the Physics Prize laureates will be made on Tuesday and the Chemistry Prize on Wednesday.
The winner of the Literature Prize will be disclosed on Thursday, and literary circles have suggested it could go to a poet for the first time since 1996 or a Spanish-language author for the first time since 1990.
Sweden´s Tomas Transtroemer, Syria´s Adonis and South Korea´s Ko Un have thus been mentioned as possible winners among poets, while Peru´s Mario Vargas Llosa, often cited in Nobel speculation, could finally clinch the distinction.
Last year, French author Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio took the honours.
For the Peace Prize, to be revealed on Friday and the only Nobel prize to be announced in Oslo, the field appears to be wide open.
The prize committee said last week it had still not made its choice among the record 205 candidates this year, and would meet twice more before Friday to make its selection.
Observers in Norway said however they expected the committee to return to a classical interpretation of peace, after widening the scope of the prize in recent years to include the fields of environmentalism and the fight against climate change.
Efforts to wipe out cluster bombs, which cause particular damage to civilians, could be honoured, with possible laureates seen as the Cluster Munitions Coalition or the humanitarian organisation Handicap International.
Last year, the award went to Martti Ahtisaari, the former president of Finland and conflict troubleshooter.
The Economics Prize will wrap up the Nobel season on Monday, October 12.
This year´s laureates will receive 10 million Swedish kronor (1.42 million dollars, 980,000 euros) which can be split between up to three winners per prize.
SOME FACTS ABOUT NOBEL PRIZES
- The oldest laureate to win a Nobel was Russian-born American Leonid Hurwicz, who was 90 years of age when he won the Nobel Economics Prize in 2007. He lived only a few months longer, passing away in June 2008.
- Vitaly Ginzburg of Russia, who won the 2003 physics prize, is the oldest living Nobel laureate. He celebrated his 92nd birthday on October 4, 2008. William Knowles of the United States, who won the 2001 chemistry prize, is in second place, turning 92 on June 1, 2009, two weeks older than 2002 chemistry laureate and fellow American John Fenn.
- In 2007 British author Doris Lessing became the oldest winner of the Nobel Literature Prize, aged 87 when her name was announced. Lessing later described winning the award as a "catastrophe" because it left her no time to write.
- Since 1901 when the first Nobel prizes were awarded, a total of 35 women have been honoured and 754 men. Since its creation in 1968, no woman has won the economics prize. In the past 10 years, two women have won the literature prize, and two have won the peace prize. No woman has won the physics prize since 1963, nor the chemistry prize since 1964.
- British laureate Lawrence Bragg, who won the physics prize in 1915, was 25 years old when he won and remains the youngest laureate in the history of the prizes. Germany´s Werner Karl Heisenberg, the 1932 physics laureate, was 31 when he won, while British author Rudyard Kipling remains the youngest Nobel literature laureate ever honoured, aged 42 when he won in 1907.
- Six fathers and sons have won a Nobel, but there has been only one father-daughter and one mother-daughter pair among the laureates. Three married couples have won Nobels. In each of the three latter cases, French scientist Irene Joliot-Curie was one of the laureates.
- Six laureates have declined a Nobel. The only two to do so of their own will were Jean-Paul Sartre, who turned down the 1964 Literature Prize, and Vietnam´s then-prime minister Le Duc Tho, who refused to share the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize with US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Adolf Hitler forbade three German laureates -- Richard Kuhn (Chemistry 1938), Adolf Butenandt (Chemistry 1939) and Gerhard Domagk (Medicine 1939) -- from accepting the prize, while Soviet authorities forced Boris Pasternak to decline the 1958 Literature Prize.
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