After a hiatus of one year, the Swedish Academy announced the winners of Nobel Prize in Literature for the years 2018 and 2019 on Thursday.
Austrian writer Peter Handke is the winner for 2019 and Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk for 2018, according to Mats Malm, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy.
Peter Handke was praised by the judges “for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.”
Peter, in his fifty-year literary career, has established himself “as one of the most influential writers in Europe after the Second World War,” according to a press release published on the Nobel Prize website.
Olga Tokarczuk, who won the Man Booker International Prize 2018 for her novel Flights, became the 15th woman to win this prestigious prize since 1901.
She was commended by the academy for her “narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life,” according to the press release.
Both of the winners will receive a cash award of Nine million Swedish Krona ($1.1 million).
For each year, the prize is awarded to an author who has, in the words of the founder of the prize, Alfred Nobel, “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction” in the field of literature. No winner was announced for the year 2018 following scandals involving sexual allegation assault.
