Popular Dissemination
| 2019
An Ideal Direction? The Nobel Prize to Peter Handke
The Nobel Prize for Literature 2019 was awarded to the Austrian Peter Handke for “an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.” However, beyond his literary merit, Handke is well-known for his revisionist interpretation of the 1990s conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Against a background of continuing tension in Bosnia, and with the Nobel literature committee attempting to redeem themselves after the 2018 sexual harassment scandal, it seems an odd choice to award the prize to such an adversarial figure.
