STOCKHOLM, Oct 7: Austria's Elfriede Jelinek won the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday for her controversial novels and plays in which she attacks violence against women, explores sexuality and political extremism in Europe.

Born in 1946 to a father of Czech-Jewish origins and a Viennese mother, she is best known for her autobiographical 1983 novel 'The Piano Teacher', which was made into a movie in 2001.

Her publisher Alexander Fest was taken by surprise, as Jelinek had not been widely tipped to win. "She deserved it. She's an amazingly unique writer with great courage and she shows no mercy either to her themes or to herself," he told Reuters at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

The Swedish Academy, awarding the prize to a woman for the first time since 1996, praised "her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's cliches and their subjugating power".

Jelinek has tackled the legacy of the Nazi era as well as human relations. Prominent themes in her work are female sexuality, its abuse and the war of sexes in general, jolting readers with unemotional descriptions of brutality and power play. Her novel "Lust" is a description of sexuality, aggression and abuse. -Reuters