Olga Tokarczuk, Peter Handke win Nobel Prize for Literature for 2018, 2019.

Olga Tokarczuk, Peter Handke win Nobel Prize for Literature for 2018, 2019.

Olga Tokarczuk and Peter Handke have been announced as the winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2018 and 2019 respectively today October 10, 2019.

The Nobel Prize was founded by Alfred Nobel the Swedish businessman, chemist, engineer, inventor, and philanthropist. Every year since 1901, the prize is handed out in the categories of peace, chemistry, medicine, and literature. This is a literary blog so we have an interest in the Literature category which has been won by Africans Albert Camus (1957), Wole Soyinka (1986), Naguib Mahfouz (1988), Nadine Gordimer (1991), and J. M. Coetzee (2003).

The Nobel Prize literary committee failed to announce a winner in 2018 following sexual assault allegations and significant resignations in 2017 that rocked the Swedish Academy. They remedied this by announcing the winner of both 2018 and the 2019 awards today. The winners for the awards and their citation are;

Olga Tokarczuk (2018)

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2018 is awarded to the Polish author Olga Tokarczuk “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopaedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.” Tokarczuk is a Polish writer, activist, and public intellectual.

Peter Handke (2019)

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2019 is awarded to Peter Handke “for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.” Handke is an Austrian novelist, playwright, and translator.

The two winners each receive over $910,000 in prize money and the international acclaim accompanying recognition as a Nobel Laureate.

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