Irish writer John Banville told he’d won the Nobel Prize in ‘convincing’ hoax

'For about 40 minutes I was a Nobel Prize winner.'

Writer John Banville suffered a major disappointment this week when he was briefly duped into thinking he'd won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Banville, whose work spans decades and is highly decorated, received a phone call on Thursday from someone purporting to be Mats Malm, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, telling him he had won the award. The call came shortly before the actual recipients of the prize were publicly announced.

"I believed it. The call came from Stockholm, why would I not believe it?," Banville told The Irish Times.

He said he began ringing friends and family to tell them the good news but that his daughter phoned him after the announcement was made to tell him that his name hadn't been included. It was then that he realised it had been a hoax.

"I was disappointed of course. When you are phoned up and told you got the Nobel Prize you are not thinking straight."

Banville said that rather than being aimed at him, he thinks the stunt was an attempt to discredit the Academy, which has been embroiled in a number of controversies in recent years. The Academy said that it is investigating the incident.