Nobel peace prize auctioned by Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov fetches record $103.5m

The Nobel Peace Prize that Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov was auctioning off to raise money for Ukrainian child refugees has sold for $103.5m (£84.5m), shattering the record for a Nobel.

“I was hoping that there was going to be an enormous amount of solidarity,” Muratov said after the sale. “But I was not expecting this to be such a huge amount.”

Previously, the most ever paid for a Nobel prize medal was in 2014, when James Watson, whose co-discovery of the structure of DNA earned him a Nobel prize in 1962, sold his medal for $4.76m. Three years later, the family of his co-recipient, Francis Crick, received $2.27m in bidding run by Heritage Auctions, the same company that auctioned off Muratov’s medal on Monday, World Refugee Day.