Pole, Austrian win Nobels in literature
The Nobel Prizes for Literature for 2018 and 2019 have been won, respectively, by Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk and Austrian novelist and playwright Peter Handke.
Announcing the awards on Thursday, the Swedish Academy cited Tokarczuk’s “narrative imagination that, with encyclopedic passion, represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life”.
Tokarczuk, 57, won last year’s Man Booker International Prize for her novel Also an essayist, activist and public intellectual, she is known for her critiques of nationalism.
Her novels include Drive Your
Plow Over the Bones of the Dead and Primeval and Other Times. The last Pole to win the literature prize was poet Wislawa Szymborska in 1996.
Also a poet, essayist, screenwriter and translator, Handke, 76, was singled out for “an influential work that, with linguistic ingenuity, has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience”. His novels include Sorrow Beyond Dreams, Slow Homecoming and The Great Fall.
The most recent Austrian literature laureate was playwright and novelist Elfriede Jelinek in 2004.
The prize, which has been awarded annually almost every year since 1901, will net each writer $915,000, a medal and certificate, and the obligation to deliver a lecture in Sweden at some future date.
The winners were selected, as usual, by the Swedish Academy. This year it chose a second laureate to make up for the absence of an award in 2018 due to a scandal that embroiled the academy involving allegations of sexual assault and conflict of interest. As well, academy member Katarina Frostenson was forced to resign over claims that she had leaked the names of past winners.
Lars Heikensten, executive director of the Nobel Foundation, said: “Our reputation is everything. Obviously, it is important to avoid this kind of situation we have been in and of course it cannot be repeated.”
The king of Sweden will officially present the awards at a lavish banquet in Stockholm on Dec 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of the industrialist and scientist Alfred Nobel, whose multimillion-dollar bequest funded the establishment of the awards.
The Nobel Prize in Literature has been criticized for other reasons in recent years. While the prizes in medicine, chemistry, and physics, and the prize for peace, are all widely acknowledged as the pinnacles of achievement in their fields, the prize for literature is viewed by some detractors as less than perfect, thanks in part to its decadeslong record of favoring Western authors and those who write in the English language.