Important Facts For Prelims
Nobel Prize in Literature 2019
- 15 Oct 2019
- 2 min read
Austrian writer Peter Handke bagged the 2019 Nobel Prize for Literature, and Polish author Olga Tokarczuk was named the winner for 2018.
- Last year, the Swedish Academy (Stockholm), which awards the annual Nobel Prize for Literature, called off the ceremony owing to allegations of sexual misconduct within the Academy.
- Handke was awarded “for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience”.
- The choice of Handke has created a controversy for his alleged allegiance to Serbain nationalist sentiments and his sympathies for former Serbian resident Slobodan Milošević, whom more than one international agencies held responsible for the Bosnian genocide in which more than 8,000 people were murdered.
- This whole issue has triggered the age-old question of whether a writer should be judged for his works he represents or his personal biases and political leanings.
- Olga Tokarczuk was awarded “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life”.
- She is only the 15th woman to win the Nobel literature prize since 1901.
