…Kenya’s Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o lost out again
Pole’s Olga Tokarczuk and Australia’s Peter Handke have been named winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2018 and 2019 respectively.
The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2018 is awarded to the Polish writer, activist, and public intellectual, Olga Tokarczuk “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopaedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.”
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2019 is awarded to Peter Handke, an Austrian novelist, playwright, and translator “for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.”
The two winners each receive over $910,000 in prize money.
Meanwhile Kenya’s veteran writer, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was expected to win the prize since last year when the Nobel Prize literary committee failed to announce a winner following sexual assault allegations and resignations that rocked the Swedish Academy. They however remedied this by announcing the winner of both 2018 and the 2019 awards.
A commitment had been made by the Swedish academy to increase diversity and move away from a “Eurocentric perspective of literature.”
The Nobel Prize was founded by Alfred Nobel the Swedish businessman, chemist, engineer, inventor, and philanthropist. Every year since 1901, the prize is handed out in the categories of peace, chemistry, medicine, and literature.
Wole Soyinka was the first African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986.
