Chair of the Holberg Board, Sigmund Grønmo, announced the winners in Bergen today, March 11. The official award ceremony will take place June 4 in Bergen where the prizes will be presented to the laureates by H.R.H. Crown Prince Haakon and Minister of Education and Research Torbjørn Røe Isaksen. Michael Cook (1940) is a Professor at the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Selected titles include Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong, A Brief History of the Human Race and The Quran: A very short Introduction. Spring 2014 his new book Ancient Religions, Modern Politics: The Islamic Case in Comparative Perspective will be published on Princeton University Press

According to the Holberg Committee Cook’s research has uncovered new perspectives on the relationship between religion, politics and law. Moreover, he has reshaped fields that span from Ottoman studies, the history of the Wahhabiyya movement, and Islamic law, ethics and theology. He was also among the first scholars to employ non-Islamic sources when researching the genesis of early Islam.

Cook’s research has been translated into many languages; Japanese, Arabic and Persian to mention a few. During spring 2014 Cook will publish another book which explores why Islam has gotten a prominent political role in our time.

The Holberg Prize amounts to 4,5 million Norwegian kroner and has been called ‘the Nobel Prize of the arts, humanities and social sciences’.

The youngest Nils Klim-laureate ever

The linguist, Terje Lohndal (1985), is the youngest recipient of the Nils Klim Prize ever. The Prize amounts to 250 000 Norwegian kroner.

Lohndal receives the Prize due to the originality of his many publications on a high international level.

Lohndal is already an international household name within the linguistics. His research is often described with formulations as Chomskyan linguistics and formal grammar. Lohndal himself says that he wants to understand the human language faculty.

- I want to know whether there are any language-specific mechanisms at work, and what the interplay between the language faculty and general cognition is. It is an incredibly ambitious and demanding project. Specifically I am looking at the interplay between language structure and meaning, says Lohndal. Lohndal is educated at the University of Oslo and received his PhD-degree at the Department of language and literature.