STOCKHOLM: The Austrian writer Peter Handke has won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature, and the postponed 2018 award went to the Polish author Olga Tokarczuk. Each laureate receives just over €825,000 in prize money.

It is the first time in the award’s 118-year history that two literature prizes have been given in the same year. The move follows sexual assault allegations and high-profile resignations from the Swedish Academy, the institution that administers the Nobel Prizes, in 2017, which led to the cancellation of last year’s prize announcement.

Handke, who is 76, won the 2019 prize “for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience”, the academy said. The 2018 prize, delayed by a year, went to Tokarczuk “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life”.

BREAKING NEWS:
The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2018 is awarded to the Polish author Olga Tokarczuk. The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2019 is awarded to the Austrian author Peter Handke.#NobelPrize pic.twitter.com/CeKNz1oTSB

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 10, 2019

Handke, best known for his screenplay for Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, is controversial. His eulogy in Serbian at the funeral of Slobodan Milosevic in 2006 provoked much criticism. Later that year he was nominated for the €50,000 Heinrich Heine Prize, but political opposition resulted in the award being withdrawn.

He won the International Ibsen Award, the world’s leading theatre award, in 2014 for “a body of work that is unparalleled in its formal beauty and brilliant reflection. If Ibsen was the model playwright of the bourgeois epoch, which has yet to end, Peter Handke is undoubtedly theatre’s most eminent epic poet.”

Handke, who was born in Kärnten, studied law at the University of Graz from 1961 to 1965 but broke off his studies when his first novel manuscript, Die Hornissen (The Hornets, 1966), was accepted in 1965. In the same year, the legendary play Publikumsbeschimpfung (Offending the Audience) was put on in Frankfurt, directed by Claus Peymann.

Handke has since published more than 30 novels and prose works and has written a number of plays and screenplays. He has won a number of international awards for his literary work and is regarded as one of the great names of European literature. Handke lives in Chaville, outside Paris.

(Agencies)