Noble Prize for Literature Awarded

Elfriede Jelinek, the Austrian novelist and playwright, has been awarded this year's Nobel Prize for Literature.

The Swedish Academy awards the prizes and praised Jelinek's musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power.

Jelinek was born in 1946 and is best known for her novel The Piano Teacher, which was made into a film in 2001. Her monetary prize is 10 million Swedish crowns worth $1.36 million.