Multiple nominations in same year for same prize, not unprecedented.
From FAQs, over at NobelPrize.org:
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The Library Page
A vignette from The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900 - 1914, Philipp Blom, c. 2008, pp 190 - 192.
Baroness Suttner (1843 - 1914) was a remarkable woman.
Born Countess Kinsky in Prague, she belonged to one of the Habsburg empire’s most illustrious families.
Her father having died before her birth, Bertha’s childhood was dominated by her nervous and impulsive mother, whose addiction to gambling soon squandered the remnants of the family fortune. The young countess was forced to earn her living, even though her aristocratic upbringing had prepared her for little more than life in elegant drawing rooms. Enterprising from the start, she attempted to make a career as a singer and then as a music teacher. But despite her accomplishments at the piano it was difficult to make ends meet, and so the young woman chose the only alternative left for one of her class: in 1873, aged thirty, she became a lady companion at the house of Baron von Suttner in Vienna.
What followed seems to have sprung off the pages of a romantic novel.
The young, poverty-stricken noblewoman fell in love with Arthur von Suttner, her employer’s son.
Faced with stiff parental opposition, she fled temptation and moved to Paris where she answered a newspaper advertisement for a position as private secretary to a ‘wealthy elderly gentleman’ whose melancholy, cultured personality enchanted her.
He was Alfred Nobel, the industrialist and inventor of dynamite. After a few weeks, however, passion got the better of reason and the Baroness travelled back to Vienna and eloped with Arthur.
Penniless, the couple were in no position to choose their place of exile and went to the Caucasus (today Georgia), where a friend of the family had a country estate. Twelve years of hardship followed, during which Bertha tried to earn money by penning occasional pieces for Viennese newspapers and Arthur contributed his part by giving French conversation and riding lessons.
During the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 - 1878, Bertha was appalled to see the misery of war in wounded soldiers and civilians, and she turned her home in Tiflis into a makeshift hospital. The impression was so deep that she resolved to devote the rest of her life to promoting peace.
By 1885, the couple’s financial situation and relations with the von Suttner family were sufficiently stabilized to envisage a move back to Vienna, where Bertha threw herself into writing an autobiographical novel, Die Waffen nieder! (Put Down Your Arms!), which appeared in 1889 and was an immediate bestseller. Her descriptions of anguished wives and mothers and massacred soldiers, of lives and hopes destroyed in the name of glory and fatherland, touched hundreds of thousands of readers, and suddenly Bertha von Suttner was a household name.
More than thirty novels followed.
Inevitably, Baroness Suttner’s fame was controversial …
…. undeterred by sexual politics, criticism, and caricature, Baroness Suttner continued her campaign. Her platonic affair with Alfred Nobel had not ended with her flight back to her lover, and she had kept up a steady correspondence with the older man, who had become a father figure to her….
…. conceived for use in engineering, in building tunnels, mines and roads, dynamite had also transformed warfare, and Nobel was acutely aware that a part of his fortune rested on destruction. He therefore resolved to devote his profits to the promotion of peace.
In 1892, [he and Baroness Suttner] hatched the plan of awarding a prize in Alfred’s name to peace activists. Nobel died in 1896. In his well he bequeathed his entire fortune to a foundation to award prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature and Peace.
In 1905 the Nobel Prize was award to Bertha von Suttner, who painted an apocalyptic protrait of conflict in the age of industrial warfare.
Baroness Bertha von Suttner was the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
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