Ossietzky

Archivists at Britain’s National Archives and a research team at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg in Germany are working on a joint project to sort, catalog and digitize the collection, which gives a nuanced portrait of private lives, international commerce and state power in an age of rising empires.

“You find so many individual voices by men, women — children, even — who speak, not as a colonial administrator, but as a person abroad,” said Dagmar Freist, a historian at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg who directs the Prize Papers Project.

Byalyatski is the fourth person to win the Nobel Peace Prize while in detention, after Germany's Carl von Ossietzky in 1935, China's Liu Xiaobo in 2010 and Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi, who was under house arrest, in 1991.

Despite a campaign to set him free, the government refused to release Ossietzky, who was ill with tuberculosis.

According to biographical notes on the Nobel website, Ossietzky was barred from traveling to Norway to accept the award and was kept under surveillance at a civilian hospital until his death in 1938.