Sweden's most famous living poet Tomas Transtromer won the Nobel prize for literature on Thursday, more than 20 years after a stroke severely limited his speech and movement but not the power of his writing.
The 80-year-old was honored for a relatively sparse canon of surreal, but lyrical poetry which initially dwelled upon Transtromer's memories of long summers on an island outside Stockholm, but has become darker and more personal since his stroke in 1990.
News that a native Swede had won literature's most prestigious award, worth 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.45 million), for the first time since 1974 was warmly welcomed by a nation whose cultural accomplishments are rarely recognized on the world stage beyond the popularity of crime writers Henning Mankel and Stieg Larsson or the music of 1970s band Abba.
At a brief news conference, Transtromer was flanked by his wife Monica who answered many of the questions directly.
The poet is partly paralysed down his right side and has difficulty speaking, but he managed to describe his feeling at winning the award with the words: "Very good, very good."
His wife told reporters: "We were very, very surprised. We have not realized that this is real yet. Like any other Swedish literature lover and pensioner, we were sitting in front of our TV to see who was going to get the prize.
"We were hoping that a poet would get the prize. That he got it was a big bonus."
Transtromer had been a perennial favorite with bookmakers to win the prize and has been nominated every year since 1993.
Other names in the frame in the run-up to Thursday's announcement were Syrian poet Adonis, Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami and even U.S. singer Bob Dylan.
The last time a Swede picked up the Nobel literature prize was in 1974 when it was shared by Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson, a controversial choice because they were both members of the academy.
Transtromer makes it four European winners in the last five years, while Americans have been overlooked since Toni Morrison in 1993, leading to criticism that the prize is too Eurocentric.
PRAISE FROM WORLD OVER
Peter Englund, permanent secretary at the Swedish Academy, described Transtromer as "one of the foremost poets in the world today."
Loud cheers among the gathered press greeted the announcement, and dozens of messages from around the world were posted on the Nobel organizer's' website.
Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt was one of the first to congratulate Transtromer: "I know that many people have hoped for this for a long time," he said in a statement.
Henrik Lundin, who works at the Akademibokhandeln book shop in Stockholm, said he was delighted with the award.
"I never thought this would happen," he said. "I thought the Academy wouldn't dare give the prize to a Swede for the next 100 years. It's great that such a popular person got the prize - it's something everyone (in Sweden) knows about."
Englund said Transtromer's work evoked strong emotions with an economy of expression in deftly constructed poems.
Neil Astley, founding editor at Transtromer's British publishers, Bloodaxe Books, called his work "visionary.
"It's about nature, it's about people, it's about the forces of nature, man and nature, freedom and control, so many elements are in his work."
Transtromer was born in Stockholm on April 15, 1931 to a schoolteacher mother and a journalist father.
His 1954 work, "17 poems," was one of the most widely acclaimed literary debuts of the decade and, after gaining a degree in psychology he divided his time between writing and working as a psychologist.
As well as being popular in Sweden, his collections have been translated into more than 60 languages.
While difficult to pin down, American poet Robert Hass once said of Transtromer: "Tomas's poetry gave a piercing sense of what it's like to be an ordinary person going about their life at the moment when that life goes off the tracks."
($1 = 6.916 Swedish Crowns) (Additional reporting by Patrick Lannin, Anna Ringstrom, Johan Sennero; Editing by Mike Collett-White)