Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus from Bangladesh smiles with his award during a ceremony at the city hall in Oslo, Norway, yesterday. Nicknamed 'banker to the poor', Yunus and the Grameen Bank that he founded shared the prize for their work to lift millions out of poverty by granting tiny loans to the poorest of the poor, especially women in rural Bangladesh. The 2006 prizes are each worth 10 million Swedish crowns (US$1.47 million). - Reuters

STOCKHOLM (Reuters):

Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk and six academics, credited with breakthrough research on the origins of life, the universe and economic policy, accepted their Nobel prizes in Stockholm yesterday.

Along with the other Laureates, Pamuk received his diploma and medal from Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf at Stockholm's concert hall, which was garlanded with some 13,000 flowers.

Earlier yesterday, 'banker to the poor', Muhammad Yunus, and his Grameen Bank accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo for a powerful grass-roots campaign to relieve poverty in Bangladesh.

Pamuk, accompanied by his 15-year-old daughter, was the first literature winner in three years to attend the ceremony.

U.S. physicists John Mather and George Smoot won the physics prize for discovering a type of radiation that gave clues to the origin and age of the universe, while U.S. economist Edmund Phelps accepted his prize for research into the interplay between inflation and employment.