2019 Literature Nobel Prize awarded to Austrian author Peter Handke

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2019 has been awarded to Austrian author Peter Handke “for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience”, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement on Thursday.

Peter Handke was born in 1942 in a village named Griffen, located in the region Kärnten in southern Austria. His debut novel ‘Die Hornissen’ was published in 1966. Together with the play ‘Publikumsbeschimpfung’ (‘Offending the Audience’, 1969), he certainly set his mark on the literary scene.

More than fifty years later, having produced a great number of works in different genres, 2019 Literature Laureate Peter Handke has established himself as one of the most influential writers in Europe after the Second World War.

The peculiar art of Peter 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.  At the same time his writing shows an unending quest for existential meaning. Therefore, wandering and migration is his primary mode of activity, and the road is the place for what he has called his ”epic step”.

His bibliography contains novels, essays, notebooks, dramatic works, and screenplays.

BREAKING NEWS:The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2018 is awarded to the Polish author Olga Tokarczuk. The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2019 is awarded to the Austrian author Peter Handke.#NobelPrize pic.twitter.com/CeKNz1oTSB

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 10, 2019

The Nobel Prize for achievements in science, peace, and literature have been awarded since 1901 and were created in the will of dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel. The prize in Literature is given to, in the words of the will of Alfred Nobel: “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.”