Peter Handke

Peter Handke, born on 6 December 1942 in Griffen in the Carinthia region of southern Austria, is an Austrian writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2019. His mother belonged to the Slovenian minority, and he grew up with her and her new husband. After a Christian high school in Klagenfurt he studied law at the University of Graz but gave up the course when his first novel, Die Hornissen, appeared in 1966. His bibliography covers novels, essays, notebooks, dramatic works and screenplays. The Nobel Foundation describes him as one of the most influential writers in Europe after the Second World War, who from the 1960s kept his distance from community-oriented and political demands and sought new literary expressions for his discoveries. He has lived in Chaville, near Paris, since 1990.