The 2018 and 2019 Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to Polish author Olga Tokarczuk and Austria’s Peter Handke respectively.
There are two winners this year because the Swedish Academy which oversees the prestigious award, suspended it in 2018 after a sexual assault scandal.
While 76-year-old Handke is seen as a controversial figure for his support for the Serbs during the 1990s Yugoslav war and for speaking at the 2006 funeral of former Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic who was accused of genocide and other war crimes, 57-year-old Tokarczuk is considered the most talented Polish novelist of her generation.
The choice of Tokarczuk and Handke comes after the Swedish Academy promised to move away from the award’s “male-oriented” and “Eurocentric” past.
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