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Poland’s Tokarczuk and Austria’s Handke Win Nobel Prizes in Literature

Polish author Tokarczuk was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature and the 2019 prize was given to Austria’s Handke.

Poland’s Tokarczuk and Austria’s Handke Win Nobel Prizes in Literature
Olga Tokarczuk and Peter Handke. (Source: The Nobel Prize’s official Twitter handle)

(Bloomberg) -- Polish author Olga Tokarczuk was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature for a “narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.”

The 2019 prize was given to Austria’s Peter Handke for “an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience,” the Swedish Academy in Stockholm said in a statement on Thursday.

Poland’s Tokarczuk and Austria’s Handke Win Nobel Prizes in Literature

The 2018 prize had been postponed after a scandal in which the husband of former academy member Katarina Frostenson was sentenced to prison for rape. In the wake of the scandal, a number of academy members left the more than 200-year-old institution, which had also been accused of being old-fashioned and opaque. It has since changed some of its statutes and also invited outside experts to its awards committee, which was previously open only to lifetime academy members.

Annual prizes for achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, peace and literature were established in the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, who died in 1896. The total amount for each of the 2019 prizes is 9 million kronor ($916,000).

To contact the reporter on this story: Veronica Ek in Stockholm at vek@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Edith Moy at echan10@bloomberg.net, Niklas Magnusson

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.