Wrong! Serbian television had fallen for an Internet hoax, alerting that the 90-year-old had taken the much-heralded award minutes before the formal announcement in Sweden.

Unknown hackers on Thursday posted the information on what looked like an official Nobel Prize website. It included Cosic’s photo, quotations from one of his books and a description heralding him as a prophet.

The Serbian writer is popular among his countrymen, but also considered a proponent of the Serbian nationalism which led to the bloody breakup of the former Yugoslavia in 1990s.

The 2011 Nobel Prize in literature was awarded Thursday to Tomas Transtromer, a Swedish poet.