Golden Hall in Stockholm City Hall for today's Nobel Prize award ceremonies

© Mikhail Markovskiy/Shutterstoc

Congratulations, 2019 Nobel Prize laureates!

This opulent room is the Golden Hall, a banquet hall in Stockholm City Hall, which will be one of the venues for today's Nobel Prize award proceedings. The room, which is completely covered in mosaic tiles, includes representations of Swedish history and culture. Swedes refer to their capital as Mälardrottningen—the Queen of Lake Mälar—and our image depicts the queen with the city of Stockholm in her lap (the city lies between the lake and the Baltic Sea).

Tonight, on the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death, most of this year's Nobel laureates, the king and queen of Sweden, and more than 1,000 guests will attend the award ceremony at the Stockholm Concert Hall. There the king will present each winner with a gold medal, a unique handcrafted diploma, and a document confirming the monetary amount of their Nobel Prize (9 million Swedish krona or about $925,000 this year). Next, this same group will attend the Nobel banquet in Stockholm City Hall's Blue Hall, followed by dancing here in the Golden Hall. These events are the culmination of a more than 14-month process of nominations and selections by the Nobel Committee and other institutions. While five of the six Nobel Prizes are presented here in Stockholm, the Peace Prize is awarded by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, something that Alfred Nobel stipulated in his final will. This occurs in a separate ceremony, usually on the same day, in Oslo, Norway.