With V S Naipaul and Salman Rushdie among the top favorites to win the coveted Nobel prizes, the winner in the field of medicine would kick off a week of prize announcements culminating with the prestigious peace award. The prizes, each worth 9 million Kronor ($ 215,000), are always surrounded by speculation. The suspense for literature award, usually the first announced was heightened last week when the Swedish Academy failed to reach a decision, leaving the timing of the announcement uncertain and bumping medicine into the top slot. The winners of the prizes for Physiscs and Chemistry will be announced on Tuesday and for Economics, the only one not established in Nobel's will be held on Wednesday in Stockholm. The Peace Prize is to be announced on Friday in Oslo, Norway. Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist and inventor of dynamite, left only vague guidelines in his will establishing the prizes. The selection committee deliberates in strict secrecy. The only public hints available are for the peace prize. The five-member awards committee never reveals the candidates, but sometimes those making the nominations announce their favorites. This year that includes US President Bill Clinton and former US President Jimmy Carter for wide-ranging peace efforts, as well as former US Senator George Mitchell for his efforts to resolve conflict in Northern Ireland. Other reported nominees are former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari and former Rrussian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin for their Balkan peace efforts, South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung for promoting good relations in Asia and a town in the northern Albania's Kukes, for accepting 150,000 refugees during the Kosovo conflict. Bureau Report