Heirs to Goethe and a cultural cross-border recipient receive the award

"For a narrative art that, with an encyclopedic desire, embodies the cross-border as a form of life," reads the motivation for Olga Tokarczuk. She was born in 1962 and has been translated into over 30 languages. Tokarczuk has previously been awarded, among others, The Man Booker international prize and lives in Nowa Ruda in southwestern Poland.

Peter Handke was born in 1942 in Carinthia, Austria and debuted in the mid-60s, he has written novels, lyric and drama and has been translated into over 20 languages.

"Olga Tokarczuk's big theme is cultural diversity and movements in stories that revolve around movements and borders," said the academy member and Nobel committee member Anders Olsson during the press conference:

- Peter Handke has said that the classics saved him and he is not least an heir to Goethe by starting from man's concrete experience of the outside world. But it is also this starting point in the present that makes him an acute contemporary poet, Anders Olsson continued.

Concerning that both award winners have accepted the award after the recent years' turbulence within the Academy, Anders Olsson replied that the Academy in this case was successful.

- We have completely based on our assessment of the literary works, we have been successful in this process, he said.

It was in November last year that it became clear that the Nobel Committee, which decides who is awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, would be supplemented by five external members. Those selected were the critics Mikaela Blomqvist, Rebecka Kärde, Henrik Petersen and the writers Kristoffer Leandoer and Gun-Britt Sundström.

On the premises of the Stock Exchange were Rebecka Kärde, Mikaela Blomqvist and Henrik Petersen.

When asked whether the new procedure in the academy with the inclusion of five external experts worked, the critic Rebecca Kärde answered:

- We are nine people and everyone's votes weigh equally strongly. Then the Academy, that is, those who have been in the past have had a better look at those who have been current for a long time. So we external people have had to do more readings. In this way, the work has different ways. But the further into the process we have come, the sooner it has become, she said.

- We have been very passionate about this process all along, Henrik Petersen filled in.

Whether or not the Academy is moving forward following the crisis that broke out in the fall of 2017, Anders Olsson replied that the Academy is not yet ready for analysis.

- We are not ready to analyze this new process yet, but we will do that next year. But it has been important for us to bring in external expertise during this period and we will see what comes out of it, ”said Anders Olsson.