The Academy cited Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio as “who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.”

This was the fourth of the prestigious Nobel Prizes handed out this year, with awards in chemistry, physics and medicine made in the past three days.

A man reads the latest book “Atemschaukel” of German writer Herta Mueller in a Berlin book shop, October 8, 2009. Mueller, a Romanian-born writer who produced tales of the disenfranchised and fought for free speech, won the 2009 Nobel prize for literature on Thursday.

The Nobel Prizes have been awarded annually since 1901 to those who ” conferred the greatest benefit on mankind during the preceding year.”

The annual Nobel Prizes are usually announced in October and are handed out on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of Alfred Nobel, a Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite.

Each prize consists of a medal, a personal diploma and a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor (1.4 million U.S. dollars).

German writer Herta Mueller arrives for a news conference in Berlin, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 8, 2009. Herta Mueller, a little-known Romanian-born author who was persecuted for her critical depictions of life behind the Iron Curtain, won the 2009 Nobel Prize in literature Thursday in an award seen as a nod to the 20th anniversary of communism’s collapse.