Handke ‘a writer with whom to discover the world’

The publisher of Nobel literature laureate, Peter Handke, says reading his work is like exploring the world.

“He is like no other capable of seeing things that perhaps nobody else would see,” Jonathan Landgrebe of the publishing house Suhrkamp said.

“And to follow his writing, to read them, means to explore the world in a new way.”

He also said that Suhrkamp is very happy for Handke being recognized this way.

What an utter shame! The @NobelPrize has disgraced itself – again – in awarding the Literature Prize to #PeterHandke … the man who gave a glowing eulogy at the funeral of mass war criminal Slobodan Milosevic! https://t.co/HuaCT02Ccy

— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) October 10, 2019

Landgrebe called him an “exceptional writer” of whom not many exist anymore in this world.

“And an author who deserves this Nobel literature prize like no-one else in the world.”

Earlier on Thursday, the Swedish Academy announced that Austrian writer Handke won the 2019 Nobel Prize for Literature.  Handke, 76, was recognised for a body of work which includes novels, essays, notebooks and drama and “that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience,” the Academy said in a statement.

Handke established himself as one of the most influential writers in Europe after World War Two, the Academy said.

He also co-wrote the script of the critically-acclaimed 1987 film “Wings of Desire.”

The author of books such as “The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick” and “Slow Homecoming”, he attracted widespread criticism attending the funeral of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in 2006.

British writer Salman Rushdie once criticised him for “a series of impassioned apologias for the genocidal regime of Slobodan Milosevic”.