Peter Handke, Olga Tokarczuk Win Nobel Prizes For 2019, 2018 After Sex Scandal Rocked The Academy

The annual Nobel Prize for literature for the year 2019 went to Austrian author Peter Handke, while Polish author Olga Tokarczuk will receive the prize for 2018, the Nobel Committee disclosed on Thursday.

The prizes in literature for 2019 and for last year were announced simultaneously on Thursday after the 2018 literature award was rocked by sex abuse scandal.

Handke’s magnum opus ‘Die Hornissen’ was published in 1966. Together with the play ‘Publikumsbeschimpfung’ (‘Offending the Audience’, 1969), he set his mark on the literary scene.

The fascinating art exhibited in the work of Handke is the extraordinary attention to landscapes and the material presence of the world, which has made cinema and painting two of his greatest sources of inspiration.

Polish author Tokarczuk was chosen “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life,” the committee said in a statement issued on Thursday.