This year's Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to the US poet Louise Glück.

Axar.az reports that, Glück was recognised for "her unmistakable poetic voice, that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal" said the Swedish Academy, which oversees the award.

The Academy added she was "surprised" when she received their phone call.

Glück, born 1943 in New York, lives in Massachusetts and is also professor of English at Yale University.

The Academy's permanent secretary Mats Malm said he had spoken to Glück just before making the announcement.

"The message came as a surprise, but a welcome one as far as I could tell," he said.

She is the fourth woman to win the prize for literature since 2010, and only the 16th since the Nobel prizes were first awarded in 1901. The last American to win was Bob Dylan in 2016.

Glück won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for her collection The Wild Iris and the National Book Award in 2014. Her other honours include the 2001 Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the Wallace Stevens Award, given in 2008, and a National Humanities Medal, awarded in 2015.