The controversial 2019 Nobel literature laureate, Austrian author Peter Handke, gave his inaugural lecture on Saturday night in front of the Swedish Academy and in the face of intense criticism of his selection for the honour.

Handke, 77, who is perhaps best known for cowriting the film Wings of Desire, is accused of supporting the genocidal Serbian regime led by Slobodan Milošević and of denying the extent of Serbian terror and killing during the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia.

Since the announcement of the prize in October, international writers and human rights campaigners have called upon academicians to change their minds. Two Nobel committee members have resigned, while others, including the former permanent secretary, the historian and writer Peter Englund, refused to attend this year.

The award has been especially attacked in ethnic-Albanian majority Kosovo, which was a Serbian province until it broke away after the 1998-99 war and a place in which Serbia carried out mass atrocities.

On Saturday, the Kosova government announced it will boycott the formal ceremony on Tuesday, in which Handke will receive his SEK9m (£743,000) prize money and his medal. Kosovo’s ambassador to the US, Vlora Çitaku, has already called the choice of Handke “scandalous … a preposterous and shameful decision”.

Quoting at great length from his dramatic poem, Walk About the Villages, Handke gave the Stockholm dignitaries gathered in the city’s old town an elliptical and lyrical speech, avoiding direct reference to the row surrounding this year’s prize. He did finish his lecture, however, by referring to the time he had spent avoiding protesters in Norway when he was given the Henrik Ibsen award in 2014. He spoke with warmth of a moment when one of his bodyguards had shared some Norwegian love poetry with him on the screen of his mobile phone. In his speech accepting that prize, he had told his critics: “Go to hell, where you already are.”

His Nobel lecture, instead, drew heavily on Slovenian-Slavic religious litanies. Handke reminisced about hearing them “beneath the romanesque arches of the church” near his birthplace village of Stara Vas in Slovenia on the Austrian border .

He quoted a long rote of epithets and invocations from the Laurentian Litany to Our Lady.

His long creative career, Handke said, had been given its rhythms, and even its “oomph”, not just from books, but from paintings and films. He listed the westerns of John Ford and Yasujirō Ozu’s Easterns, as well as the music of Johnny Cash, Leonard Cohen and Bob Marley.

On Friday, Handke dismissed questions from journalists about his admiration of Milošević and his denial of the Srebrenica massacre, in which almost 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed, saying it was not the moment to answer “ignorant” queries. He added: “This is a very long story. To tell this story here, I think it’s not the moment.”

In defence of the Nobel committee’s choice of Handke, its chair, Anders Olsson, has emphasised that “the ambition is to celebrate his extraordinary literary work, not the person”. Olsson also told Mehmet Kraja, president of the Academy of Sciences and Arts in Kosovo: “It is clear that Handke is understood in different ways … When Handke is awarded the prize, the ambition is to celebrate his extraordinary literary work, not the person … We should strive to respect each other notwithstanding sharply diverging views in important matters.”

Nevertheless, a petition signed by almost 60,000 people calling on the Nobel committee to revoke the award from the “apologist for the ‘butcher of Balkans’, Milošević is due to be delivered by protesters at Tuesday’s ceremony in Stockholm.

Also giving her Nobel lecture on Saturday, just ahead of Handke, was Polish feminist writer Olga Tokarczuk, 57, who won the 2018 medal, postponed as a result of another scandal that engulfed the jury last year.

Tokarczuk’s speech did not tackle criticism of Handke head-on, but was much more forthright. Her subject was the enduring importance and power of story-telling in efforts to establish historical truth.

“A thing that happens and is not told ceases to exist and perishes. This is a fact well known to not only historians, but also (and perhaps above all) to every stripe of politician and tyrant. He who has and weaves the story is in charge,” she said, going on to refer to the new difficulties literature and history face in the age of online international communications.

“The internet, completely and unreflectively subject to market processes and dedicated to monopolists, controls gigantic quantities of data used not at all pansophically, for the broader access to information, but on the contrary, serving above all to program the behaviour of users, as we learned after the Cambridge Analytica affair,” she said.

“Instead of hearing the harmony of the world, we have heard a cacophony of sounds, an unbearable static in which we try, in despair, to pick up on some quieter melody, even the weakest beat.”