"The peace prize to Yunus and Grameen Bank is also support for the Muslim country of Bangladesh, and for the Muslim environments in the world that are working for dialogue and collaboration," he said.

Pamuk, 54, accepted the literature prize for a body of work that illustrates the struggle of Turkey to find a balance between East and West.

"I still have that childish feeling of joy and happiness whenever I write," Pamuk said in his acceptance speech. "(For) me, literature and writing are inextricably linked with happiness, or the lack of it ... unhappiness."

The writer, whose novels include "Snow" and "My Name Is Red," was tried earlier this year on charges of insulting his country for acknowledging the mass killing of Armenians in World War I. The charges were eventually dropped over a technicality.

Swedish Academy permanent secretary Horace Engdahl said Pamuk had made his native Istanbul "indispensable literary territory" equal to Feodor Dostoyevsky's St. Petersburg and James Joyce's Dublin.

U.S. researchers have long dominated the science awards, and this year swept them for the first time since 1983.

The Nobel Prize in medicine went to Andrew Z. Fire and Craig C. Mello for discovering a powerful way to turn off the effect of specific genes.

John C. Mather and George F. Smoot won the physics prize for work that helped cement the "big bang" theory of how the universe was created.

Nobel physics committee chairman Per Carlson said that with their findings, "the first step toward understanding the development of structures in the universe had been taken."

Roger D. Kornberg won the prize in chemistry for his studies of how cells take information from genes to produce proteins, a process that could provide insight into defeating cancer and advancing stem cell research. His 88-year-old father, Arthur, who won the 1959 Nobel Prize in medicine, attended the ceremony.

Economics winner Edmund S. Phelps was cited for research into the relationship between inflation and unemployment, giving governments better tools to formulate economic policy. The economics award is not an original Nobel Prize, but was created by the Bank of Sweden in 1968.

In Bangladesh, thousands of people set aside the nation's latest political crisis to watch live television coverage of the ceremony in Oslo.

In Yunus' home district of Chittagong, several thousand people squatted or stood around a large screen put up at a stadium. People clapped and shouted "Long live Bangladesh" when he spoke a few words in Bengali, the national language, during his acceptance speech.

The award ceremony in Oslo was followed by a lavish banquet, and some 1,300 people, including Sweden's royal family, attended a white-tie gala dinner in Stockholm.

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