( CNN ) -- Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer won the Nobel Prize in literature , the Swedish academy that announces the annual award said Thursday . The poet beat out bookies ' favorites Bob Dylan and Haruki Murakami . `` I ca n't do anything but cheer ! Everyone here is just so happy , '' said Transtromer 's spokeswoman Anna Tillgren . She said she had not been able to speak to the poet about his award yet . The academy said it gave the award to Transtromer `` because , through his condensed , translucent images , he gives us fresh access to reality . '' The Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa won the award last year . He is known for the novels `` Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter , '' `` The Green House , '' `` Captain Pantoja and the Special Service '' and `` The Storyteller . '' But the academy has had a tendency to pick obscure European writers over the past several years . The Literature prize went to Romanian-born German writer Herta Muller in 2009 , and to the French poet Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio the year before that . Until the Le Clezio award in 2008 , the prize usually went to writers with a recognized worldwide reputation , such as British playwright Harold Pinter in 2005 , Colombian magical realist Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 1982 , and American novelist Toni Morrison in 1993 -- the last American to win it to date . Transtromer , 80 , won a lifetime award from the prestigious Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry in 2007 , his website says . Since 1901 , the committee has handed out the Nobel Prize in literature 103 times . The youngest recipient was Rudyard Kipling , the author of the `` Jungle Book . '' Kipling won it at age 42 in 1907 . The oldest winner was Doris Lessing who was 88 when was named in 2007 . On Wednesday , the prize in chemistry was awarded to Israeli scientist Daniel Shechtman . Shechtman is a professor at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and is known for his discovery of quasicrystals . On Tuesday , the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences named Saul Perlmutter of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California , Berkeley ; Brian P. Schmidt of Australian National University and Adam G. Riess of Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute , the winners of the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics . They made the discovery that our universe apparently is expanding at an accelerating rate some 14 billion years after the Big Bang . The Nobel committee on Monday named Ralph Steinman , a biologist with Rockefeller University , and scientists Bruce A. Beutler and Jules A. Hoffmann , the winners of the 2011 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine . This week , the committee also will announce the prize for peace . The prize in economics will be announced Monday .
NEW : `` I ca n't do anything but cheer ! '' Tomas Transtromer 's spokeswoman says . NEW : The award has gone to obscure Europeans three of the past four years . Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa received the literature award last year .