Stockholm - Thursday's win for Romanian-born Herta Mueller of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literaturehas made it a record-year for female prize winners. Never since first Nobel prizes were awarded in 1901 have four women been named winners of one of the coveted awards in the same year.
The Nobel week opened Monday with Elisabeth H Blackburn and Carol W Greider, both of the US, named co-winners of the medicine prize.
Ada E. Yonath of Israel shared the chemistry prize on Wednesday, before Mueller took her prize Thursday.
Two Nobel award announcement remain on the 2009 calendar. The peace prize on Friday in Oslo, Norway, and the economic science prize on Monday in Stockholm.
In 2004, three women won Nobel prizes, Linda B Buck of the US for medicine, Elfriede Jelinek of Austria for literature, and Wangari Maathai of Kenya for peace.
Nobel prizes are awarded for medicine, physics, chemistry, literature, and peace.
A prize is also awarded for economics but was not in the original will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite, who endowed the awards.
