New Delhi: In a bid to support Ukrainian child refugees, Nobel Peace Prize winner and Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov on Monday auctioned his prize for a whopping $103.5 million shattering the old record for a Nobel prize. Heritage Auctions, which managed the sale didn’t reveal the identity of the buyer but said the winning bid was made by proxy, reported news agency AP.
Muratov, who was surprised at the bidding after the nearly three-week auction ended on World Refugee Day said: “I was hoping that there was going to be an enormous amount of solidarity, but I was not expecting this to be such a huge amount.”
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Muratov, who had received the Nobel Price in October 2021, is the founder of the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta and was the publication’s editor-in-chief. However, the publication was shut down in March amid the Kremlin’s clampdown on journalists and public dissent amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
It is then that Muratov decided to auction his prize before which he had already announced donating the accompanying $500,000 cash award to charity. Muratov shared the Nobel Peace Prize last year with journalist Maria Ressa of the Philippines for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression.
The proceeds of his sale will go to UNICEF to help children displaced by the war in Ukraine. Just minutes after the bidding ended, the global body told the auction house it had already received the funds.
The online bidding process, which started on June 1 and coincided with International Children’s Day, witnessed several bids coming through telephone or online. Muratov also left Russia for New York City to be a part of the bidding process.
Earlier, the Nobel Prize medal fetched $4.76 million in 2014. James Watson, who co-discovered the structure of DNA, sold the Nobel Prize that he won in 1962. Three years later, the family of his co-recipient, Francis Crick, received $2.27 million in bidding also run by Heritage Auctions.