The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Norwegian author Jon Fosse.

Mats Malm, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, announced the prize on Thursday in Stockholm.

The Nobel Prizes carry a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) from a bequest left by their creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. Winners also receive an 18-carat gold medal and diploma at award ceremonies in December.

He joined an illustrious list of past winners that ranges from Toni Morrison to Ernest Hemingway and Jean-Paul Sartre – who turned down the prize in 1964.

Last year, French author Annie Ernaux won the prize for what the prize-giving Swedish Academy called "the courage and clinical acuity" of books rooted in her small-town background in the Normandy region of northwest France.

Ernaux was just the 17th woman among the 119 Nobel literature laureates. The literature prize has long faced criticism that it is too focused on European and North American writers, as well as too male-dominated.