Poland's Tokarczuk and Austria's Handke win Nobel literature prizes
Austria’s Peter Handke won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature, and the postponed 2018 award went to Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, the Swedish Academy said on Thursday.
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Handke won the 2019 prize for “for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience,” the Academy said in a statement.
The 2018 prize was delayed by one year after a sexual assault scandal rocked the award-giving Academy.
It was awarded to Tokarczuk for “a narrative imagination that with encyclopaedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.”
Learn more about the 2018 and 2019 Nobel Prizes in Literature.
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 10, 2019
Press release: https://t.co/QwM93Gsjqt
2018 bio-bibliography: https://t.co/FqKoJLCsqF
2019 bio-bibliography: https://t.co/5Gj8DNnKdj#NobelPrize
The shortlist comprised eight names of which two were picked for the 2018 and 2019 awards, said Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy.
With the glory comes a 9-million kronor ($918,000) cash award to be shared, a gold medal and a diploma. The laureates receive them at an elegant ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10 the anniversary of Nobel’s death in 1896 together with five other Nobel winners. The sixth one, the peace prize, is handed out in Oslo, Norway on the same day.
(FRANCE 24 with AP, REUTERS)
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