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n announcing the award in Stockholm Oct. 7, the Swedish Academy praised her "musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays" that "reveal the absurdity of society’s clichDes and their subjugating power."

Jelinek, 57, said in an interview with The Associated Press in Vienna that she would not make the Dec. 10 ceremony in Stockholm because she suffers from "a social phobia."

A handful of other literature recipients have not attended, although rarely by choice. Injuries from a pair of plane crashes kept Ernest Hemingway from going in 1954. Four years later, Boris Leonidovich Pasternak first accepted then was forced by the Soviet government to decline. Jean-Paul Sartre turned down the award, in 1964.

The predominantly male Nobel committee made Jelinek the first woman to receive the literature prize since it was given to Wislawa Szymborska of Poland in 1996. Only 10 women have won it in the Nobels’ 103-year history.

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