Nobel Prize in literature goes to writer who ‘fuelled ethnic hatred’
If the board behind the Nobel prize in literature had hoped for a serene return to business after a sex harassment scandal forced the suspension of last year’s award, they were fondly deluded.
The Swedish Academy is again mired in controversy after bestowing the 2019 medal on an avant-garde Austrian writer who delivered a eulogy at Slobodan Milosevic’s funeral and five years ago called for the prize to be abolished because it ‘‘falsely canonised’’ authors.
Peter Handke, 76, who has written novels, dramas and the screenplay for the 1987 film Wings of Desire, was commended for his ability to infuse ‘‘the smallest of details in everyday experience with explosive significance’’.
He was congratulated by Sebastian Kurz, 33, the former Austrian chancellor.
President Alexander Van der Bellen of Austria, 75, praised his gift for ‘‘illuminating the in-between spaces of existence’’.
During the wars that accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s the writer became a champion of the Serbian cause and opposed Nato’s military intervention.
He was accused by Salman Rushdie, among others, of denying the 1995 genocide at Srebrenica, in which ethnic Serbs killed 8000 Bosnian Muslims.
Handke’s polemics led Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian president, to decorate the author with the Order of the Serbian Knight. Milosevic later tried to summon Handke as a defence witness during his trial for war crimes.
Vlora Citaku, 39, Kosovo’s ambassador to the US, recalled that Handke had once said that he could imagine himself being ‘‘a Serbian Orthodox monk fighting for Kosovo’’.
‘‘In a world full of brilliant writers, the Nobel committee chooses to reward a propagator of ethnic hatred and violence,’’ she said. ‘‘Something has gone terribly wrong.’’
Yesterday the academy also awarded the delayed 2018 prize to Olga Tokarczuk, 57, a Polish writer whose experimental novel Flights won the Man Booker International prize last year. Anders Olsson, a senior member of the Nobel committee, said her work was ‘‘full of wit and cunning’’ and the panel had been particularly impressed by her historical novel Ksiegi Jakubowe (Jacob’s Books), which has yet to be translated into English.
The prize was postponed last year amid claims of financial chicanery and the academy’s slowness to act on reports of sex assaults by an author married to one of its board members. – The Times
‘‘In a world full of brilliant writers, the Nobel committee chooses to reward a propagator of ethnic hatred and violence. Something has gone terribly wrong.’’