The first of the 2010 Nobel Prizes will be awarded this afternoon, as the Nobel Prize committee, buoyed by favourable public reaction to its 2009 Peace Prize Award, applies its future-focused vision to other areas of endeavour.

The award in Literature will be given to North New Zealand University student Marinda Lowensmith, whose novel The Sorrow and the Saint is a sweeping saga of intergenerational sycophancy. The Prize committee notes that once it is written, the novel promises to be a stylistic tour de force. Two literary agents who have seen early drafts of the novel’s outline believe the $1.5 million prize will provide key encouragement to Lowensmith, helping him to recover from last night’s pub crawl and continue with his research in the seedier areas of Auckland.

The 2010 award in Chemistry goes to Samantha Selmerfol, who is currently trying to get into the Southeast North Dakota Technical College. Selmerfol has a hunch that corn-based ethanol could someday be converted into fertilizer.

The Nobel Prize Committee’s statement notes that “with the right encouragement, Selmerfol’s ground-breaking work could provide sustainable employment for farmers around the world, growing crops to provide fuel to provide fertilizer to grow crops. And even further into the future, Selmerfol’s research may relieve farmers around the world of their drudgery, as chemists convert fuel to fertilizer and back again without the messy intermediate crop stage.”

Paris high-school student Maurice Delaliberté began his far-reaching inquiries into the nature of time and space while still in École Élémentaire. With the encouragement of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Physics, the prize committee hopes that Delaliberté will live up to the potential that many of his teachers have seen in him, passing next spring’s grueling examination and then finding some conceivable practical application for string theory.

The Nobel Prize Committee believes it is just common sense to award the 2010 prizes now, allowing the recipients to start enjoying the prize money before they get old and affluent, but they have made an exception for Economics. “Everyone knows that there is no hope for the world economy anyway, and if we give economists $1.5 million today, they will probably just blow it all on the stock market,” the Committee’s statement says. “But the world’s economists do remind us that nothing is more difficult to predict than the future, and we are all in their debt.”