OdishaPlus Bureau
Polish author Olga Tokarczuk and Austrian novelist Peter Handke have been named the 2018 and 2019 winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. The prize was postponed last year for the first time in 70 years after the Swedish academy was hit by a sexual assault scandal at the height of the MeToo Movement, leaving the institution paralyzed.
Olga Tokarczuk, author of ‘Księgi Jakubowe‘ (‘The Books of Jacob’), won the prize for “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life,” the jury said.
The Polish writer was described by the Swedish Academy as someone who “never views reality as something stable or everlasting. She constructs her novels in a tension between cultural opposites; nature versus culture, reason versus madness, male versus female, home versus alienation”.
Olga Tokarczuk, the 15th woman to win the Nobel Literature Prize, has won the International Booker Prize in 2018.
Peter Handke, who once called for the Nobel Literature Prize to be abolished, won “for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience,” it said.
The academy praised Peter Handke’s work which, it said, “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.
The prize brings its winner “false canonization” along with “one moment of attention (and) six pages in the newspaper,” he told Austrian media in 2014, news agency AFP reported.
Both winners will receive 9 million Swedish kronor ($912,000) each, along with a medal and a diploma at a formal ceremony in Sweden on December 10, the death anniversary of dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel, the creator of the Nobel Prizes.
The Nobel Literature Prize, considered to be the most prestigious award in the literary world, has been awarded to 116 people since 1901, of which only 15 are women.
Several literary critics had predicted that at least one of the winners would be a woman after the sexual harassment scandal engulfed the academy.