European royals, U.S. celebrities, 6,000 schoolchildren and thousands of honorary guests gathered in Oslo and Stockholm on Wednesday to celebrate the winners of the 2014 Nobel Prizes.

French novelist Patrick Modiano has devoted his career to exploring the traumas of the Nazi occupation of his country, including how it could strip people of their identities.

Japan’s Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano and U.S. scientist Shuji Nakamura won the Nobel Prize in physics for the invention of blue light-emitting diodes.