Poland’s Olga Tokarczuk and Austria’s Peter Handke win Nobel Prizes for literature
- Tokarczuk, considered the most talented Polish novelist of her generation, was honoured for ‘narrative imagination’
- Handke won for a work that explores ‘the specificity of human experience’
Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk on Thursday won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature, which was delayed over a sexual harassment scandal, while Austrian novelist and playwright Peter Handke took the 2019 award, the Swedish Academy said.
Tokarczuk was honoured “for a narrative imagination, that with encyclopedic passion, represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life”.
Considered the most talented Polish novelist of her generation, Tokarczuk has written more than a dozen books and won numerous honours, including Britain’s Man Booker International Prize last year and Poland’s most prestigious Nike Literary Award – twice.
Her books have been turned into plays and films and translated into more than 25 languages, including Catalan, Hindi and Japanese.
Handke won “for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience”, the Academy said.