The Nobel Peace Prize was on Friday awarded to Venezuela's opposition leader and democracy activist Maria Corina Machado, a "unifying" figure in what has become a "brutal" state, the Nobel jury said.

Woken in the middle of the night by a call from the secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee who informed her of the prize, the 58-year-old said she was confident the opposition would succeed in securing a peaceful transition to democracy in her country.

"We're not there yet. We're working very hard to achieve it, but I'm sure that we will prevail," she told Kristian Berg Harpviken in a video of the call posted to X.

"This is certainly the biggest recognition to our people that certainly deserve it," she said, adding: "I am just, you know, one person. I certainly do not deserve this."

Machado, who has lived in hiding for the past year, was honoured "for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy," said Jorgen Watne Frydnes, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo.

The committee hailed her as "one of the most extraordinary examples of........

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