pic: Armend Nimani/AFP/Getty
Besides Lucia and her flickering crown on the 13th, the other bright point in the otherwise compact darkness of December is the Nobel festivities. We will certainly miss the late permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Sara Danius, a bright point in a bright point, and the way she would sweep down the stairs in a fabulous dress (putting everyone else to shame in more ways than one).
pic: DN.se
Despite frantic measures to put the Nobel Prize for Literature back on its feet, it was again lambasted this year for its choice for the 2019 prize. Already two members of the external committee that helps the Academy choose a prize winner have stepped down this last week, and now, a long-term member of the Academy, Peter Englund, has said he will not participate in the award ceremony in protest of the 2019 choice, Peter Handke.
The critique of Peter Handke is in regard to his not very critical stance towards the Serbian regime during the war in former Yugoslavia. He is accused, among other things, of relativising mass murder, and of denying the genocide of 8000 muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995 (SvD.se/Handke). Peter Englund saw the war first hand as a reporter for Expressen and Dagens Nyheter: “To celebrate Peter Handke’s Nobel prize would be extreme hypocrisy from my side” he wrote in a mail to DN.
Others are not so categorical. “He is basically anti-fascist; there is a lot of evidence for this” said Thomas Steinfeld , a professor of theory and literary criticism. “When he avoids the use of the word genocide for anti-fascist reasons, it’s interpreted as though he’s denying it.” Steinfeld goes on to say that this is the biggest misunderstanding of Handke’s work (SvD.se/Handke). (There are reams of articles about Handke’s nomination in all sorts of languages, if interested).
Meanwhile, 2018’s prize winner, Olga Tokarczuk, will – yes – be visiting school children at a Rinkeby school during her week in Stockholm after all. The tradition has been that this particular school studies the literature of the prize winner (why it isn’t Peter Handke, see above), and then the prize winner visits the school. Earlier, Tokarczuk was not going to visit the school at all, but someone reminded her that these are children, this is what is done, and that she needed to get with the program. It was just a misunderstanding, said her translator.