Austria's Elfriede Jelinek won the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday for novels and plays that starkly depict violence against women, explore sexuality and condemn far-right politics in Europe.
The 57-year-old author, best-known for her semi-autobiographical novel "The Piano Teacher" - made into a movie in 2001 - was a surprise winner. She is the first Austrian and ninth woman to win literature's highest accolade.
Jelinek said at her Viennese home she felt "more desperation than happiness" at the news, telling Reuters it would turn her into what she "never wanted to be - a person in the public eye".
The reclusive writer, said by one editor to "show no mercy either to her themes or to herself", said she would not collect the 10 million crown ($1.36 million) prize in person.
"I am not mentally able to withstand that. I have a social phobia and cannot stand these large crowds of people," she said.
Her unemotional descriptions of the power play in sex and human relations, and outspoken political views, have alienated many in her native Austria but have also won her respect as a fearless feminist writer who makes bold use of language.
"She has absolute moral and political integrity," Delf Schmidt of her publishers Berlin Berlag told Reuters. Born in 1946 to a father of Czech-Jewish origins and a Viennese mother, she studied music at the Vienna Conservatory before making her literary debut with a collection of poems in 1967. But wider acclaim came with the novels "Women as Lovers" in 1975 and "Wonderful, Wonderful Times" in 1980. Jelinek, a member of Austria's Communist Party from 1974 to 1991, has tackled Austria's Nazi past and refused to perform in public after far-right leader Joerg Haider's party joined the government.
The right-wing anti-immigration Freedom Party of Joerg Haider issued a statement accusing Jelinek of "taking pleasure in dragging Austria through the mud".
"The Piano Teacher" tells of a middle-aged woman, trained at the Conservatory like Jelinek, who seeks release from a rigid society via voyeurism, sado-masochism and self-mutilation with a razor. One review of the movie with Isabelle Huppert said it had possibly "the strangest sex scene in the history of movies".
Gert Mattenklott of Berlin's Free University said her work "campaigned against the sexual subjugation of women and against patriarchal society" in a shrill tone not to everybody's taste.
Her critics say she uses obscene, vulgar and blasphemous language and one review of Michael Haneke's film of "The Piano Teacher" called it a mix of "Schubert, self-mutilation and porn". But publisher Alexander Fest said at the Frankfurt Book Fair that her writing showed "great courage and huge savagery".