New Delhi: In an unprecedented move, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced two Nobel winners for literature, one each for the year 2018 and 2019.
Austrian author Peter Handke was awarded this year’s Nobel Prize while Polish author Olga Tokarczuk was given the 2018 Nobel. Each author will receive 9 million SEK (roughly Rs. 6.5 crores).
BREAKING NEWS:
The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2018 is awarded to the Polish author Olga Tokarczuk. The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2019 is awarded to the Austrian author Peter Handke.#NobelPrize pic.twitter.com/CeKNz1oTSB
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 10, 2019
This is the first time in the award’s 118-year-old history that two awards were announced at the same time. The academy had chosen not to name an awardee last year after it was hit with the #MeToo controversy over sexual assault, and financial impropriety allegations.
In its official announcement, the academy said Tokarczuk was awarded for her “narrative imagination, that with encyclopedic passion, represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life”. She is the 15th woman to have won the prestigious honour of 114 awardees.
On Handke, the academy said his “influential work” with “linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.”
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