More than 100 journalists gathered in the Exchange to meet the Nobel laureates in literature, Olga Tokarczuk and Peter Handke during Friday. Early on, Handke was asked how he feels about the protests scheduled for Tuesday's awards ceremony, followed by several critical questions. But Handke avoided replying and instead read a letter he claimed to have received from a cultural journalist at the New York Times.
- He refuses to understand that this is a golden opportunity to put out to the world what he wants to say, comments Ulrika Milles press conference and continues:
- A writer is at least two people, the inner person and the person himself. Then the literature and the work are something for themselves. Here an old and wounded man appears and you do not really want to see that, she says.
The criticism of Handke has been about his pro-Serb positions in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and that in 2006 he spoke at Milosevic's funeral. Handke has been accused of denying the genocide in Srebrenica, something he has firmly denied.
See the entire conversation in the clip above.