10th October, 2019
The two winners were announced today.No winner was announced in 2018.
Olga Tokarczuk got the prize “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.”
She never views reality as something stable or everlasting. She constructs her novels in a tension between cultural opposites; nature versus culture, reason versus madness, male versus female, home versus alienation.
The magnum opus of Literature Laureate Olga Tokarczuk so far is the impressive historical novel ‘Księgi Jakubowe’ 2014 (‘The Books of Jacob’). She has in this work showed the supreme capacity of the novel to represent a case almost beyond human understanding.
The Austrian Handke got the award for 2019 because of his extraordinary attention to landscapes and the material presence of the world, which has made cinema and painting two of his greatest sources of inspiration.