The Nobel Prize for Literature goes to the French Annie Ernaux.
The Swedish Academy announced this Thursday afternoon in Stockholm.
This year there were 233 candidates on the so-called long list for the award – which names are among them is kept top secret every year.
In addition to Ernaux, betting shops recently counted the Frenchman Michel Houellebecq, the Canadian Anne Carson and the Indian-British writer Salman Rushdie among their closest favorites.
In view of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, a prize for a Ukrainian author or the Russian critic Lyudmila Ulitzkaja, who has been in Berlin since the spring after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, was also considered possible.
A year ago, the Swedish Academy surprisingly awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to the - until then - relatively unknown Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah.
He was honored "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the ramifications of colonialism and the plight of the fugitive across the divide between cultures and continents."
The year before, the prize had gone to the American poet Louise Glück - she was not previously considered one of the numerous favorites either.
This year's Nobel Prize winners in the categories of medicine, physics and chemistry had already been announced in the past few days.
The literary award will be followed on Friday by the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize winner, the only one not to be held in Stockholm but in Oslo.
The announcement in the economics category rounds off the annual Nobel prize round on Monday.
All Nobel prizes this year are endowed with ten million Swedish crowns per category.
Converted, this corresponds to almost 920,000 euros.
The prestigious awards are traditionally presented on December 10th, the anniversary of the death of prize donor and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel (1833-1896).