A bewildered chorus of “Who?” arose from the watering holes of publishing folk last week as the winner of the Nobel prize for literature was named as Elfriede Jelinek, a reclusive Austrian feminist who had written what The New Yorker called “the strangest sex scene in the history of the movies”.

Some cited the perversity of the Swedish judges in choosing another obscure author. “I thought it would go to an Albanian this year, so I am only slightly wrong,” one prominent British publisher commented. “But I bet it’ll be an Indian next year.”

Perhaps, others ventured, the Swedes had identified with an Austrian woman who declared, like Greta Garbo, that she wanted to be alone. Indeed, the most intriguing reaction to the news by the 58-year-old author was that she had a “social phobia” that prevented her receiving the award in Stockholm.

“It doesn’t suit me as a person to be put on public display,” she said. “I feel threatened by it. I’m not in a mental shape to withstand such ceremonies.”

This may seem surprising as The Piano Teacher, the shocking film adapted from her eponymous novel and starring Isabelle Huppert, won three top prizes at Cannes in 2001 and gave Jelinek a taste of international acclaim, albeit brief.

Her solitary lifestyle in the large house which she shares with her mother in Vienna may be connected to the emotions she arouses among her fellow countrymen. She has become a hate figure to Austria’s right, whom she ferociously provokes, and to the middle classes, whom she satirises.

Jelinek’s sulphurous attacks on Austrian politicians, including Kurt Waldheim, the former United Nations secretary-general, for their failure to acknowledge their own and the country’s Nazi past have caused her to be ostracised at home.

However, her reclusiveness predates these events. She spent the whole of 1968 in isolation living at her parents’ home after a nervous breakdown. The following year her father, of Czech-Jewish descent, died in a psychiatric clinic.

Carping at the selection of Jelinek, one of only 10 women to win the Nobel prize, is open to the charge of Anglo-centricity. Some supporters of Graham Greene have never forgiven the Nobel judges for denying the British novelist their accolade; in the English-speaking world there is an assumption that any winner other than one of theirs is an eccentric choice. This outlook reflects the fact that only 2% of books published in Britain are translations of foreign writers, the lowest in the West.

The £1m prize money will come in useful, Jelinek admitted on Radio 4’s Today programme on Friday. Although her novels make the bestseller lists in Germany, each selling more than 100,000 copies — compared with a few hundred copies a year in Britain — she has to subsist with the help of translator’s fees.

After reading some of her tortuous phrases (“Erika is baked inside the cake pan of eternity”), one could believe she also moonlights as a scriptwriter for Humphrey Lyttelton, the extravagantly metaphor-loving chairman of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue on Radio 4. However, the Swedish Academy commends her “musical flow of voices and countervoices”.

These voices reached an unholy pitch in the lurid passages of The Piano Teacher, her 1983 story of a young, arrogant male student who pursues an ageing, sexually repressed piano teacher, only to be repulsed by her sadomasochistic desires.

The sex may be largely joyless and unhygienic, in keeping with Jelinek’s theme that power and male aggression are the driving forces in relationships, but it was explicit enough to leave the Cannes audience speechless.