Barack Obama today sensationally won the Nobel Peace Prize after just nine months in office for returning America to a multilateralist foreign policy after eight years of going it alone under George W Bush.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee said it was honouring the 48-year-old US President for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples".

The five jurors, elected by the Norwegian parliament, also said in their citation that they had attached "special importance to Obama's vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons".

Mr Obama was not told of the award in advance and only found out about it when he was woken by his press secretary at 6am (1000 GMT), an hour after the decision was announced in Oslo. The President is due to make his official response to the award at the White House this afternoon.

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Rarely has an award had such an obvious political and partisan intent

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Times Archive, 1973: Worldwide criticism of Nobel peace awards

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The choice of Mr Obama came as a complete surprise – the frontrunners for the last Nobel prize of the year included the Chinese dissident Hu Jia and the Colombian senator Piedad Cordoba. It also prompted widespread controversy.

Mr Obama was elected America's first black president last December and assumed office on January 20 – which means that he had been in office less than two weeks by the time nominations closed on February 1.

Although the Nobel jurors were allowed to consider his actions after that date, he has still been in the White House for under a year and has yet to deliver on any of the major foreign policy initiatives upon which he has embarked.

The decision was welcomed by other Nobel peace laureates, including Mikhail Gorbachev, Muhammad Yunnus and Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa. Mohamed ElBaradei, who heads the UN's nuclear watchdog and won the prize in 2005, said: "I cannot think of anyone today more deserving of this honour. In less than a year in office, he has transformed the way we look at ourselves and the world we live in and rekindled hope for a world at peace with itself."

Lech Walesa, who won the prize in 1983, spoke for many with his reaction. "Obama? So fast? Too fast - he hasn’t had the time to do anything yet," the former Polish president told reporters in Warsaw.

The decision was also criticised by America's international foes – the Taleban said that Mr Obama had "not taken a single step towards peace in Afghanistan" – and is unlikely to go down well with the President's critics on the American Right.

The only person to have declined the prize in its 108-year history is Le Duc Tho, the Vietnamese revolutionary jointly honoured with Henry Kissinger in 1973, said Anne Kjelling, head librarian at the Norwegian Nobel Commitee.

Ms Kjelling did not think Mr Obama would follow that example. "We have no reason to think that he will refuse it," she said. "It will be a major boost for everything he wants to achieve."

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