The Polish novelist and activist Olga Tokarczuk and the Austrian author and a great friend of Serbia and Serbian people Peter Handke, have both won the Nobel prize in literature.

Peter Handke was born 1942 in a village named Griffen, located in the region Kärnten in southern Austria.

Handke wrote essay “Justice for Serbia” in which he stood against blaming the Serbian side for the recent wars in the Balkans. Handke argues that the Western news media have unfairly portrayed the Serbs as brutal aggressors in the Yugoslav war while presenting Croats as sympathetic victims. The eminent novelist/ playwright/essayist charges that the Croats started the war by marching militia into Serbian villages, and he blames Germany for its haste in recognizing the newly formed state of Croatia, whose constitution designated 600,000 Serbs living in Croatia as a second-class ethnic group. Born to German-Slovenian parents near the border of the former Yugoslavia, Handke traveled through Bosnia and Serbia in late 1995 accompanied by two Serbian-born friends.

In 2008, Handke was elected by the Academy of Sciences and Arts of the Republika Srpska as a foreign member.

His statement remained that “Republika Srpska and Serbia are two countries where true Europe still lives”.

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