Peter Handke

Peter Handke is an Austrian novelist, playwright, translator, and screenwriter born on December 6, 1942, in Griffen, Austria, of mixed Carinthian Slovene and German descent. He rose to prominence in the late 1960s as a key figure in the German-language avant-garde, abandoning law studies at the University of Graz in 1965 to pursue writing. He gained international fame with experimental plays such as Offending the Audience (1966) and Kaspar (1967), which challenged theatrical conventions and social conformity. His novels, featuring ultra-objective portrayals of psychological extremes, include The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1970), A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (1972), and later works such as The Moravian Night (2008) and The Fruit Thief (2017). He collaborated with director Wim Wenders on screenplays for films including Wings of Desire (1987). He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2019 'for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience,' a choice that proved highly controversial owing to his public support for Serbian perspectives during the Yugoslav Wars.