Two Nobel Prize for Literature Winners Announced

The Nobel Academy was so mired in scandal last year the Nobel Prize for Literature was not awarded, and so in a rare turn, this year two winners are to be announced. It’s the first time in more than half a century this has happened, the last postponement was during World War II.

Today that announcement was made and the Nobel Prize for Literature winners are Polish author Olga Tokarczuk who has won the postponed 2018 prize and Austrian Peter Handke, who is this year’s winner.

Judges said that Tokarczuk, 57, was recognized “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life,” while Handke, 76 was said to have won “for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.”

Olga Tokarczuk is a writer, activist and public intellectual who has been described as one of the most critically acclaimed authors of her generation. She won the Man International Booker Prize for her novel Flights, becoming the first Polish writer ever to do so, and she has now been announced as Nobel Prize winner for 2018.

Peter Handke is an Austrian novelist, playwright and translator with a long career starting with the publication of Die Hornissen (The Hornets) in 1965. Handke has won several awards during his career including The America Award, the Franz Kafka Prize and today the Nobel Prize for Literature 2019.