Swedish King Karl Gustav presented the Nobel Prize for Literature to the Austrian writer Peter Handke at the ceremony in Stockholm.
He was acclaimed for “influential work which explored the periphery and specificity of human experience with its linguistic ingenuity”.
Peter Handke has been a foreign member of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of the Republic of Srpska since 2008 and the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts since 2012.
The decision of the Swedish Royal Academy to award Handke this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature has been met with criticism from part of the public in the West and the Balkans, over alleged support provided by former Austrian writer to the president of the former Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milošević , during the armed conflicts in the 1990s.
Handke gave a speech at Milošević’s funeral in 2006.
In 1996, Handke wrote an essay entitled “Justice for Serbia.” In the meantime, he questioned the so-called “genocide” in Srebrenica, and said that the siege of Sarajevo, for which Serbs were accused, had been staged by Muslims in BiH.
Handke has created more than 70 prose works and about twenty plays, and has proven himself as a lyricist, essayist, screenwriter, translator and director. For decades, theaters around the world have been staging plays according to his texts – “Caspar”, “Swearing Audiences”, “Journey to Sonor Country.”
The novel “Goalkeeper’s Fear of Penalty”, which was included in the school’s editorial, was screened by Wim Wenders, and Handke wrote the screenplay for this director’s famous film “Sky over Berlin.”
He was born in Griffen, Carinthia on the 6th December, 1942. He grew up in East Berlin and Griffen and began his studies in Graz. In addition to Graz and Berlin, he lived in Dusseldorf and later in Paris, Kronenberg and the USA. Since 1990, he is living in the French town of Chaville, 12 kilometers southwest of Paris.
TST