Peter Handke

Peter Handke was born in 1942 in Griffen, in the Austrian province of Carinthia. His mother was a Carinthian Slovene; his biological father, a German soldier, was someone he met only as an adult, and he grew up with a stepfather whose drinking made the household violent. After a Catholic boarding school at Tanzenberg he studied law in Graz, abandoning it in 1965 when Suhrkamp accepted his first novel, The Hornets.

He made his name in 1966 with a provocative appearance at a meeting of the Gruppe 47 in Princeton and with Offending the Audience, a play in which the actors address and berate the spectators; Kaspar followed. His prose of the early 1970s — The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, The Left-Handed Woman, and A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, written after his mother’s suicide in 1971 — follows people in states of estrangement with cool, almost clinical attention, and probes the gap between language and experience. He worked closely with Wim Wenders, co-writing Wings of Desire, and directed films himself. His later books, long and contemplative, are often built around walking, seeing and the slow accumulation of detail; he has lived near Paris, in Chaville, since 1990.

He received the Georg Büchner Prize in 1973. From the mid-1990s his writings on the Yugoslav wars, beginning with A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia, and his speech at the funeral of Slobodan Milošević in 2006 provoked lasting controversy. The Nobel Prize of 2019, awarded for an influential work that explores the periphery and the specificity of human experience, was met with both acclaim and sustained protest.