Peter Handke
Peter Handke is an Austrian novelist, playwright, poet, translator and film-maker who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2019 for work the Swedish Academy praised for exploring the periphery and the specificity of human experience with linguistic ingenuity. He arrived in the 1960s as a provocateur, attacking the German literary establishment in public and writing plays that refused to behave like plays, and he is widely counted among the most original German-language writers of the second half of the twentieth century. His prose narrows relentlessly: a man walking, a room, a sentence examined until it stops making sense. His positions on the Balkan wars made the Nobel one of the most contested in the prize's history.
Movies (1)
TV (1)
Books (10)
Where to start with Peter Handke
Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter is the one to read first, a short novel about a goalkeeper drifting through a city while his own perception comes loose. Wunschloses Unglück is the most human thing he wrote, an attempt to give his mother's life the account it never got. Kaspar is the play that made his name: language teaching a boy to think, and disfiguring him in the process. He also appears briefly on screen in Alice in the Cities.