The Nobel Prize Committee this year has announced that there are 318 candidates for the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. Of this, 2015 are individuals and 103 are organisations, the committee said in a tweet.

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The announcements will be made on October 6 in Oslo, Norway.

Since 1901, when Nobel Prizes were first given, Peace Prize has been awarded by a committee of five, appointed by the Norwegian Parliament Storting in accordance with Alfred Nobel's will. The other prizes are announced in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden.

Alfred Nobel, after whom the prize is named, never disclosed why he didn't give the task of awarding the Peace Prize to a Swedish body.

The reasons are speculative.

One argument is that Nobel admired Norwegian patriot and leading author Bjornstjerne Bjornson while another is that the Storting was the first national legislature to vote in support for the international peace movement.

Nobel may also have favoured distribution of the tasks related to the Nobel Prizes within the Swedish-Norwegian union or he may have feared that given the highly political nature of the Peace Prize, it might become a tool in power politics thus reducing its significance as an instrument for peace.

"It is my express wish that in awarding the prizes no consideration be given to the nationality of the candidates, but that the most worthy shall receive the prize, whether he be Scandinavian or not," Nobel wrote in his will.

People like India’s Kailash Satyarthi and Mother Theresa, Pakistan’s Malala Yousafzai, US’ Barack Obama, and organisations like the International Red Cross, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and Doctors Without Borders are some of the recipients of the prize.