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Olga Tokarczuk, Peter Handke emerge as winners of Nobel Prize in Literature
The pair of Olga Tokarczuk and Peter Handke have both been awarded the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature for their works.
The duo were announced as the 2018 and 2019 laureates at the same time because last year’s prize was postponed over a scandal involving a husband of an academy member.
For more than a century, the Nobel Prize in Literature has often been a polarizing spectacle, with critics denouncing the winners as too obscure, too Eurocentric, too male, too experimental, or simply unworthy of literature’s highest honor.
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On Thursday, it waded into fresh controversy, awarding the prize to a right-leaning writer, Peter Handke, who delivered a eulogy at the funeral of Slobodan Milosevic, the former leader of Yugoslavia who was tried for war crimes.
This year was supposed to be a reset for the Nobel Committee, after a messy scandal involving sexual abuse and financial impropriety forced the Nobel Committee to postpone its 2018 prize for literature.
The Swedish Academy faced enormous expectations and heightened pressure this year, as it promised to deliver not one but two awards.
In addition to Mr. Handke, who received the 2019 prize on Thursday, the novelist Olga Tokarczuk received it for 2018.
Both writers are from central Europe and are known for their outspoken and sometimes polarizing political views.
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