“The great poet Handke has earned the Nobel Prize 10 times,” Elfriede Jelinek, an Austrian author who received the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature, said in a statement.

But few have had the chance to ask Handke himself in detail about his writing, or motivation. On Oct. 10, he met reporters at his home near Paris, but he ended the impromptu news conference after being asked about his writings on the Balkan wars. “I am a writer. I am rooted in Tolstoy, I am rooted in Homer, I am rooted in Cervantes,” he said. “Leave me in peace and don’t ask me such questions.”

At the news conference in Stockholm on Friday, Handke singled out a letter from The New York Times requesting an interview for this article; he declined the request, saying he did not want to answer “empty and ignorant” questions. (His publisher had already turned down several other requests.)

Handke was born in 1942 in Griffen, a small town in Austria. His mother was of Slovenian descent, and his father was a German official, with whom she had an affair. Until he was 18, Handke assumed his stepfather — a man who got violent after drinking, Handke has written — was his biological father.

“He grew up in very poor conditions, in a remote provincial region,” said Malte Herwig, a journalist who wrote a biography of Handke. “It was dirt hard. He was the only one who went to college and so on.”

“He still has this air about him,” Herwig added. “If you look at his fingernails, there’s usually dirt underneath them.”

The family lived briefly in Berlin, but then returned to Griffen in 1948. During the journey, Handke’s sister was carried in a shopping bag, he wrote in “A Sorrow Beyond Dreams,” a stark account of his mother’s life and suicide that was published in 1972.