Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize for giving “hope for a better future”.

As the Nobel Prize giving draws to a close, one of its most highly sought after prizes – the Peace Prize – has been given to US President, Barack Obama, for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy.”

The Norwegian Nobel Committee said the US President had “created a new climate in international politics” and given hope to a “world free from nuclear arms” with his powerful negotiations in arms control and disarmament.

According to reports, the decision to award the prize to Obama heralded gasps of surprise from journalists at the announcement; given the fact he has been in office a little under 9 months.

The statement from Oslo said: “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future.

“For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world’s leading spokesman.”

President Obama joins a long list of other prestigious Nobel winners that includes Marie Curie – who became the first person to win two prizes; Martin Luther King Jr – the youngest winner of the Peace Prize in 1964 at the age of 35; Albert Einstein; and Sir Alexander Fleming.

Obama is the first US president to win the prize since former US president Jimmy Carter in 2002. He will receive the award at a prize giving ceremony in Oslo on 10 November 2009.

This week the Nobel committee has been distributing its prizes at the academy in Stockholm. Yesterday (8 October) German author Herta Mueller was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature with praise for both her poetry and prose. Earlier this week, the Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to UK-based Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, along with Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath for the study of the structure and function of the ribosam – the cell’s protein factory.