Tokarczuk and Handke win Nobel Prizes in literature

Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk and Austrian author Peter Handke have both won the Nobel Prize in literature.

To a packed room at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm on Thursday, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Mats Malm announced Tokarczuk as 2018’s Nobel literature laureate, and Handke as 2019’s winner, reports The Guardian. 

Tokarczuk was cited by the committee for “a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life”, and Handke for “an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience”.

Malm said both laureates had been informed of their win. Handke was at home, and Tokarczuk was on a reading tour in Germany and had to pull her car to the side of the road when she received the call.

Tokarczuk, an activist, public intellectual, and critic of Poland’s politics, is a bestseller in her native Poland, and has become much better known in the UK after winning the International Booker prize for her novel Flights. The Nobel committee’s Anders Olsson said her work, which “centres on migration and cultural transitions”, was “full of wit and cunning”.

Handke is a more controversial choice. Olsson described the Austrian author as “one of the most influential writers of contemporary fiction, and part of the literary debate since 1966”, who “with great artistry explores the periphery and unseen places”. A playwright and novelist, whose screenplay credits include Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, he is also known for pro-Serbian views which include condemning “criminal” Nato intervention in Serbia. Attending Slobodan Milošević’s funeral, he was reported to have said that he was happy to be beside “a man who defended his people”.

“Although he has, at times, caused controversy he cannot be considered an engaged writer in the sense of Sartre, and he gives us no political programs,” said the Nobel committee in their citation.

At Tokarczuk’s UK publisher Fitzcarraldo, a small independent press which also published 2015’s Nobel laureate, Svetlana Alexievich, Jacques Testard was about to speak to his printers to rush through reprints of her books Flights and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Tokarczuk had not been published in the UK for some time when he approached her about taking on her work – he had wanted to find a Polish writer to publish in English in the wake of the Brexit referendum, and the violence against the Polish community which erupted. Tokarczuk, he said, was the clear choice.

“She’s such a special writer – she has an incredible range,” he said. “She’s also a political activist and dissident, and a figurehead for a more progressive, feminist, environmental politics. She’s a public intellectual and doesn’t shy away from that.”

In 2014, her Polish publisher had to hire bodyguards to protect her after she outraged right-wing patriots by saying that Poland had committed “horrendous acts” of colonisation in the past, leading to her being described as “targowiczanin” – an ancient term for traitor.

The selections of Handke and Tokarczuk come days after the Swedish Academy promised to move away from the “male-oriented” and “Eurocentric” past of the Nobel prize in literature, and follow an unprecedented two years of scandal at the august body, which hopes to restore its reputation with this year’s choices.

Last year’s prize was postponed because of the “reduced public confidence” that followed rape accusations made against Jean-Claude Arnault, the French husband of academy member Katarina Frostenson. Frostenson and six other members ended up leaving the Swedish Academy amid bitter rows over how the accusations were handled, and Arnault, who was also accused of leaking the names of laureates, is now in prison for rape.

The prize is given to, in the words of the will of Alfred Nobel: “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.” There have been 116 literature laureates to date – of whom just 15 are women. English is by far the most common language for Nobel laureates, with 29 winners writing in English, followed by 14 in French, 14 in German, 11 in Spanish and seven in Swedish.

Olsson, who is chair of the Nobel prize in literature committee, admitted earlier this month that: “we had a more Eurocentric perspective on literature, and now we are looking all over the world.” Olsson also admitted to a “much more male-oriented” perspective in the past, which he said was changing.

The Swedish Academy has long tended to veil the process for choosing its candidates in mystery, with its 18 members elected for life, and nominations of candidates not made public until 50 years have passed. Told to show “greater openness towards the outside world” by the Nobel Foundation, and charged with restoring its credibility, it now allows members to voluntarily resign, and has appointed seven new members, with Malm taking over from former permanent secretary Sara Danius, who was forced out during the Arnault scandal.