Anger of Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke against …

For the first time since he's been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Peter Handke He was questioned about his controversial support to the authoritarian president Slobodan Milosevic. The answer surprised all the journalists because, far from giving explanations on their look on the recent past
, the Austrian writer announced that "Never again" wants to talk to the press.

"I am a writer, I come from Tolstoy, I come from Homer, I come from Cervantes. Leave me alone and do not ask me such questions! "He reacted angrily during an act in his home town, Griffen, where they celebrated their award. At that time, reporters had asked him his opinion about more than 12,000 signatures gathered to demand that he be wiped off the Nobel Prize because he was an admirer of Milosevic, "the Balkan butcher" .

"In front of my garden (at the gates of Paris), there are 50 journalists. Everyone always asks like you. From anyone who approaches me, I learn that he has read something from my workWho knows what I wrote? The only question is how the world reacts. Reaction reaction, "replied the writer, immersed in controversy.

Out of camera, Handke added, according to the public broadcaster ORF, that "never again" will answer journalists' questions, because despite the Nobel Prize, no journalist is really interested in his literature and writings. Then he permanently suspended another press event.

Handke won the Nobel Prize for "an influential work that explored the periphery and specificity of the human experience with linguistic ingenuity" last week, at the same ceremony at which the 2018 award was awarded to the Polish Olga Tokarczuk.

The prize awarded to him reopened old wounds in the Balkans and aroused much controversy. As this newspaper said, some indignant people considered that the writer was an apologist for crimes committed in the name of Serbian nationalism, while for others, he was an intellectual who dared to fight against the demonization of the Serbs because of all the evils of society. the wars in the former Yugoslavia.

The Swedish Academy has supported it

The institution that awarded the award supported Handke Thursday, pointing out that the Austrian writer is not a warmonger nor denies war crimes as part of the Balkans contest.

"He is a provocatively provocative author who has expressed himself inappropriately and unclearly in politics, but there is nothing in their writings that involves an attack on civil society or respect for the equality of people", appears in an article published today on the website of the leading Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

The text entitled "Of course, we will not reward a defender of the war", is signed by the permanent secretary of the institution that awards the prize each year, Mats Malm, and another of its members, Eric M. Runesson.

In the brief, they also recall that Handke described what happened in Srebrenica, where Serbian militias murdered 8,000 Muslim men in 1995 during the Bosnian war, considered the "greatest crime against humanity in Europe after the Second World War" in an article in the newspaper "Süddeutsche Zeitung " in 2006.

The Academy said that nor is there any "evidence" that he glorified the murders or denied the war crimes when he attended the funeral of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, although his presence may be "stupid" for someone who holds office.