Austrian Handke and Pole Tokarczuk win Nobel prizes for literature

[October 10, 2019]  STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Austria's Peter Handke won the 2019 Nobel Prize for Literature, and the postponed 2018 award went to Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, the Swedish Academy said on Thursday.

Handke won the 2019 prize for "for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience," the Academy said in a statement.

The 2018 prize, delayed by one year after a sexual assault scandal rocked the award-giving Academy, went to Tokarczuk for "for a narrative imagination that with encyclopaedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life."

(Reporting by Niklas Pollard and Simon Johnson; additional reporting by Anna Ringstrom, Johannes Hellstrom, Johan Ahlander, Helena Soderpalm and Colm Fulton in Stockholm, Edoting by Timothy Heritage)

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