Nobel prizes in literature 2018 and 2019

The Polish novelist and activist Olga Tokarczuk and the controversial Austrian author Peter Handke have both won the Nobel prize in literature. The choice of Tokarczuk and Handke comes after the Swedish Academy promised to move away from the award’s “male-oriented” and “Eurocentric” past. Olga Tokarczuk: the dreadlocked feminist winner the Nobel needed Read more Tokarczuk, an activist, public intellectual, and critic of Poland’s politics, won the 2018 award, and was cited by the committee for her “narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life”. She is a bestseller in Poland, and has become much better known in the UK since winning the 2018 Booker international prize for her sixth novel, Flights. The Nobel committee’s Anders Olsson said her work, which “centres on migration and cultural transitions”, was “full of wit and cunning”. Picking Handke, who was cited for “an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience."