Nobel literature prize winners for 2018, 2019 announced

Nobel literature prize winners for 2018, 2019 announced

The winners of the prestigious Nobel literature prize for the year 2018 and 2019 have been announced.

Polish author Olga Tokarczuk won the prize for 2018 and an Austrian author Peter Handke clinched this year’s title.

A statement from the Academy said Olga has been recognized ”for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.”

The 57-year-old grew up in Poland where the Nobel website reports that she read ”pretty much everything she could get a hold of.”

It is this streak that led her to her writing career in 1993 when she debuted with a fictional book titled ”The Journey Of The Book-People.”

Handke on the other hand is reported to have earned the award for his literary work that has ”explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.”

The Academy noted that he was born in Southern Austria to a Slovenian mother and a German-soldier father and broke into the literary scene in 1966 with a book titled ”die hornissen.”

He has since written many other books in many different genres earning himself great influence especially in Europe.

Other Nobel literature prize winners include Bob Dylan and Kazuo Igishuro who won in the years of 2016 and 2017 respectively.

Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka is the only African to have won the prize which he received in 1986.

Nobel is a collection of awards given annually and in several categories.

Aside from literature, other categories are Physics, Chemistry, Peace and Economic sciences.

Africans who have won in these other categories include the late Wangari Matthau from Kenya who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 as well as the late Nelson Mandela and Bishop Desmond Tutu both from South Africa and recognized for their contribution to the anti – apartheid struggle.

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