After the disaster of the previous year, the Swedish Academy has announced the Nobel Prize for Literature for the years 2018 and 2019. Peter Handke for the year 2019 and Olga Tokarczuk will be honored.
As a result, the institution in Stockholm not only selects this year's winner, as usual, but is also collecting the award from the previous year. This had failed because of an extensive scandal at the Academy. Both prizes are worth 9 million Swedish kroner (around 830,000 euros).
The scandal surrounding the now-defunct Academy member Katarina Frostenson and her husband Jean-Claude Arnault had plunged the institution into a deep crisis, due to the 2018 was ultimately dispensed with a Nobel Prize. The quarrels had already started in November 2017 as part of the #MeToo revelations, after 18 women in the Swedish newspaper "Dagens Nyheter" had made allegations of sexual harassment and attacks against Arnault. He was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for rape in December 2018, and his sentence is now final.
Unlike scientific Nobel Prizes, the literary award is usually given to a single award winner. (See here all previous winners at a glance) Only four times since the first award in 1901, two literary figures got him together, most recently in 1974. According to the Nobel Statutes, a maximum of two candidates for a year can receive him.
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