Austrian writer Peter Handke and Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2019 and 2018, held a traditional lecture in Stockholm yesterday before the award ceremony.
Handke, who the day before yesterday refused to answer questions about his pro-Serbian position, yesterday devoted his lecture to reading his works and those of other writers, while the writer spoke "about the dark vision of the world that is dying out because of selfishness."
The two, together with the winners of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, Chemistry, Physics and Economics, received the award today from the Swedish King Carl Gustav XVI.
None of the journalists attended the lecture in the chambers of the Swedish Academy, which hands out the awards. Sources close to the organizers said that it was decided "for security reasons".
The lectures were broadcast live on the website of the Nobel Foundation.
As in October, when it was announced that the Austrian writer was the winner of the prestigious award, passions were stirred again. Most of the countries of the region have announced a boycott of the ceremony, a real war is raging on social networks. Representatives of Albania, Kosovo, North Macedonia, BiH and Croatia, as previously announced, did not attend the ceremony. Turkey joined the list of those boycotting because of, as stated, the denial of the genocide in Bosnia. A tireless researcher in search of language, the Austrian Peter Handke, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, is a prolific writer who fights against conventions at the cost of fierce polemics that cast a shadow on his work, the France Press agency assessed.
Handke long ago said that the Nobel Prize for literature should be abolished. "It's a false canonization that does nothing for the reader," said Handke, now 77, known for his elegant silhouette with silvery hair and a piercing gaze behind fine thin glasses.
Many in the publishing world thought that Handke, despite his world-renowned works, would never win the Nobel Prize because of his dedication to the war in the former Yugoslavia. Born in 1942 in Carinthia, Austria, to a Slovenian mother and a German father, Handke became one of the few Western intellectuals who is sympathetic to Belgrade.
A few months after the massacre in Srebrenica in 1995, the writer went to Serbia and conveyed his impressions of the trip. In 1999, Handke protested the NATO attack on Belgrade, mentioning the "new Auschwitz". Then, seven years later, he went to the funeral of Slobodan Milosevic, accused of genocide and crimes against humanity.
From a media point of view, that controversy cast a shadow over the writer's long-term work, but the Nobel Prize did not change it. Since it was announced that he was the winner of this prestigious award, Handke has shown discomfort and even anger towards journalists who are vainly looking for explanations for his views.

One of the best connoisseurs of Handke's work, the Austrian Klaus Kastberger said that Handke is "stubborn as a mule", known for accepting "unacceptable positions" as well as for interweaving "literature, politics and personal life".
Regardless of all the polemics, Handke is one of the most widely read writers in the German-speaking world. Wrote about 80 works.
"I have the dream and the power to be a universal being," Handke said a few years ago. However, the writer criticizes "international literature" in which the English language predominates and "a uniform language at the structural and grammatical level". He also criticized journalism that "colonizes literature like a cancer".
At the age of 15, Handke was deeply moved by the work "Under the Sun of Satan" by Georges Bernanos, which he read while at a Catholic boarding school. Later, he will stop his law studies in Vienna and in 1966 he will publish his first novel "Die Hornissen".
The 24-year-old writer criticizes the aesthetic principles of "Group 47", which advocated a post-war way of writing in German, and opposes the predetermined use of the language.
As a master of prose, Handke developed a sharp and intense style, saying that "one should not look for meaning but for feeling".
Migration and loneliness are at the center of his prolific oeuvre. He wrote more than 40 novels, essays, collections of poems, about 15 theater plays and film scripts. The most famous is the screenplay for Wim Vendres' cult film "Sky over Berlin" (Der Himmel uber Berlin) from 1987, which begins with the recitation of his famous "Poem on Childhood" and the verse "Als das Kind Kind war" (When a child is a child was).
Handke is currently finishing a theater piece that will be played at the Salzburg festival next year.
In the 90s, Handke moved to the outskirts of Paris to a house near a forest, which was an additional source of inspiration for the writer and walker, who normally speaks excellent French.
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