Swedish poet and psychologist Tomas Tranströmer has been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature.

The Swedish Academy said the poet (80) had won "because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality".

Born in Stockholm in 1931, Tranströmer began writing poetry at age 16, while a student at Soedra Latin School. He published his first collection of poems, Seventeen Poems (17 Dikter) in 1954.

His lyrical, surreal works explore the natural world, "falling somewhere between dream and nightmare," the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry said on awarding him a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007.

Tranströmer, who worked as a psychologist with juvenile offenders, continued to write after suffering a stroke in 1990, which left him with difficulty speaking and partially paralysed the right side of his body. A new collection, The Big Riddle, was published in 2004.

The author has translated the works of poets including the American Robert Bly and Hungary's Janos Pilinszky into Swedish.

The prize of 10 million Swedish krona (€1.07 million) was the fourth of this year's Nobel prizes, following awards for medicine on Monday, physics on Tuesday and chemistry yesterday.

Tranströmer has been an almost constant tip to win literature's most prestigious award in recent years. The prize last went to Sweden in 1974.

Peter Englund, permanent secretary at the Swedish Academy said the poet had taken the news in his stride.

"I think he was surprised, astonished," Mr Englund told Swedish television. "He sat relaxing and listening to music. But he said it was very good."

There have been four Irish winners of the prize; William Butler Yeats (1923), George Bernard Shaw (1925), Samuel Beckett (1969) and Seamus Heaney (1995).

Last year's Nobel literature prize went to Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, whose latest novel El Sueño del Celta (The Dream of the Celt) is based on the life of Irish-born British diplomat and Irish nationalist Roger Casement

Winners in the last decade have included Turkish author Orhan Pamuk in 2006 and John M. Coetzee of South Africa in 2003. The Nobel literature prize was created in the will of Alfred Nobel and first awarded in 1901.