Winners of the Nobel Prizes, including a medal, a diploma and a cash award of 9 million Swedish kronor ($940,000) being handed out Sunday in Oslo, Norway, and Stockholm, Sweden:

— South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, a longtime pro-democracy activist, was awarded the Nobel Peace Price for his efforts in establishing relations with communist North Korea. Kim’s historic June meeting in Pyongyang with the North’s leader, Kim Jong Il, ushered in the first-ever warming of relations between the two political rivals since the 1950-53 Korean War.

— Novelist and playwright Gao Xingjian, a survivor of China’s Cultural Revolution who fled the country for France after his works were banned, won the Nobel Prize in literature. The Swedish Academy cited the ‘bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity’ in such works as the play ‘Fugitives,’ set against the background of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, and ‘Soul Mountain,’ a narrative about Gao’s travels in China.

— James J. Heckman of the University of Chicago and Daniel L. McFadden of the University of California at Berkeley won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for developing theories on how people work and live, research that contributed greatly to employment training, public transportation, communication systems and other areas.

— American Jack Kilby, who invented the integrated circuit at Texas Instruments in 1958, shared the physics prize with two physicists whose work contributed to satellite and cell phone technology: Herbert Kroemer of the University of California-Santa Barbara and Zhores Alferov of the A.F. Ioffe Physico-Technico Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia.

— Alan Heeger of the University of California-Santa Barbara, Alan MacDiarmid of the University of Pennsylvania and Hideki Shirakawa of the University of Tsukuba in Japan won the chemistry prize for their discoveries in the use of plastics to conduct electricity.

— Swede Arvid Carlsson the University of Goteborg in Sweden, Paul Greengard of Rockefeller University in New York and Eric Kandel of Columbia University in New York won the medicine prize for discoveries about how messages are transmitted between brain cells, leading to treatments of Parkinson’s disease and depression.