One of the world's most prestigious honors in the field of literature has been won by the Polish author Olga Tokarczuk for what the Swedish Academy that presented the Nobel Prize in Literature said is "a narrative imagination that, with encyclopedic passion, represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life".

Tokarczuk won last year's Man Booker International Prize.

The prize, which has been awarded annually almost every year since 1901, netted the winning author 747,000 pounds ($915,000), a medal and certificate, and the obligation to deliver a lecture in Sweden at some future date.

The king of Sweden will officially present the award at a lavish banquet in Stockholm on Dec 10, the anniversary of the death of the industrialist and scientist Alfred Nobel, whose multi-million-dollar bequest in 1895 funded the establishment of the awards.

The winner was selected, as usual, by the Swedish Academy, which also picked a second laureate this year to make up for the fact that no prize was presented in 2018 because of a scandal that embroiled the academy involving allegations of sexual assault, conflict of interest, and because of the resignation of academy member Katarina Frostenson over claims that she had leaked the names of past winners.

Lars Heikensten, executive director of the Nobel Foundation, said: "Our reputation is everything. Obviously, it is important to avoid this kind of situation we have been in and of course it cannot be repeated."

The winner of the second Nobel Prize in Literature was named as the Austrian author Peter Handke who was singled out for "for an influential work that, with linguistic ingenuity, has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience".

The Nobel Prize in Literature has been criticized for other reasons in recent years. While the prizes in medicine, chemistry, and physics, and the prize for peace,are all widely acknowledged as the pinnacles of achievement in their fields, the prize for literature is viewed by some detractors as less than perfect, thanks, in part, to its decades-long record of favoring Western authors and those who write in the English language.

In addition, only 14 women had won the award as of last year, compared to 113 men.

While past recipients have included such luminaries as Albert Camus in 1957, WH Auden in 1961, John Steinbeck in 1962, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 1970, many other important writers have been overlooked, and few Asians have been selected. An exception came in 2012 when the prize went to the Chinese writer Mo Yan.

One of the most controversial choices for the award came in 2016 when the singer and songwriter Bob Dylan was recognized in a move that some serious authors said was disrespectful to their profession.