Olga Tokarczuk, 57, won the award "for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life. (Photo: ANI)

Stockholm: The 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Austrian author Peter Handke, while the 2018 award, postponed from last year, was given to Polish author Olga Tokarczuk on Thursday.

The two winners were named this year because the prize was not given last year as the Swedish Academy that oversees the award had suspended it in 2018 following a sexual assault scandal.

"The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2018 is awarded to the Polish author Olga Tokarczuk. The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2019 is awarded to the Austrian author Peter Handke," said the official twitter feed of the Nobel Prize.

Austrian playwright and novelist Peter Handke, 76, will take home the award "for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience".

Handke's body of work includes, 'A Sorrow Beyond Dreams', 'Short Letter, Long Farewell', and 'The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick'.

Olga Tokarczuk, 57, won the award "for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life."

She is the 15th woman to win the Nobel Literature Prize and had won the International Booker Prize in 2018.

The Nobel Prize 2018 was postponed in the wake of a sexual and financial scandal that engulfed the Swedish Academy.

Nobel Prize is a set of annual international awards bestowed for outstanding work in fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, economics, and the promotion of peace.

Each winning writer will receive nine million Swedish kronor (£740,000), as well as a medal and a diploma at a formal ceremony in Sweden on December 10.

This year's Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded, with one half to James Peebles for his theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology, and the other half jointly to Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz for discovering an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star.

The international award in Physiology or Medicine was jointly awarded to William G Kaelin Jr, Peter J Ratcliffe and Gregg L Semenza for their discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was jointly awarded to John B Goodenough, M Stanley Whittingham, and Akira Yoshino on Wednesday "for the development of lithium-ion batteries."

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