Protests greet Austrian writer's Nobel Prize

The Austrian writer Peter Handke, who supported the Serbian side during the Yugoslav Wars, was presented with a Nobel Prize in Literature on Tuesday at a ceremony in Sweden that was boycotted by Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Turkey.

The judges who picked the 76-year-old said they wanted to honor "an influential work that, with linguistic ingenuity, has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience".

But the selection was controversial because Nobel prizes are meant to honor people for serving humanity in their various fields and Handke's interest in the war that raged throughout the 1990s seemed at odds with the ideal.

The choice of Handke was met with a 58,000-name petition calling for the award to be revoked. And Gun-Britt Sundstrom, an external member of the Nobel literature committee, resigned over the issue because she said it signals that literature stands above politics, which it does not.

Around a dozen protesters held banners outside the venue calling for Handke not to be given the award, which comes with 740,000 pounds ($973,000) of prize money.

Adnan Mahmutovic, an organizer of the demonstration, told Reuters: "The problem with Handke is his refusal to admit genocide on the Bosnian population in the 1990s. As a serious, established writer who has a lot of clout in European literature, Handke has been used in the narrative of genocide denial in the Balkans."

The criticism follows a 1996 book in which Handke casts doubt on the Bosnia Serb massacre of men and boys at Srebrenica and claims Bosnian Muslims had staged the incident. In a televised interview in 1999, he compared Serbia's fate to that of the Jews during the Holocaust, something he later apologized for. And, in 2006, Handke spoke at the funeral of the former Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic, who had been accused of genocide and who was on trial at the time of his death.

Last month, Handke defended his work in an interview with the German weekly Die Zeit. He said: "Not one word I have written about Yugoslavia can be denounced, not a single one. It's literature."

Rebecka Karde said the Nobel committee based its decision on 70 works written during a 50-year period that include Repetition, My Year in the No-Man's-Bay, and Die Obstdiebin.

The Austrian broadcaster ORF said Handke has vowed never to speak to the media again over the criticism. He previously stated: "No-one who comes to me says that he has read any of my works, that he knows what I have written. It's just questions like how does the world react, reactions to reactions."

At a news conference in Stockholm on Friday, he refused to answer questions about the war.

"I like literature, not opinions," the BBC quoted him as saying.

The controversy follows the academy being rocked by a sex scandal two years ago that led to the 2018 prize not being awarded.

That scandal involved French photographer Jean-Claude Arnault, who was married to a member of the academy and who was accused of sexually assaulting 18 women, some in properties belonging to the academy.