Peter Handke
| Peter Handke | |
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| Born |
6 December 1942 Griffen, Austria |
| Occupation | Novelist, Playwright |
| Nationality | Austrian |
| Notable works | The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, Slow Homecoming |
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Peter Handke (German: [ˈhantkə]; born 6 December 1942) is an Austrian novelist, playwright and political activist. His writings about the Yugoslav Wars and subsequent NATO bombing of Yugoslavia with criticism of the Western position and his speech at the funeral of Slobodan Milošević have caused controversy, and he has been widely described as an apologist for far-right Serbian nationalism. He has been awarded the Georg Büchner Prize, the Franz Kafka Prize and the International Ibsen Award; the latter award was extremely controversial and Handke was met by protesters in Oslo and widely described by critics in Norwegian media as a fascist with ties to war criminals. In 2006 his nomination for the Heinrich Heine Prize caused a scandal, and the prize was withdrawn due to his political views.
Handke and his mother (a Carinthian Slovene whose suicide in 1971 is the subject of Handke's A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, a reflection on her life) lived in the Soviet-occupied Pankow district of Berlin from 1944 to 1948 before resettling in Griffen. According to some of his biographers, his stepfather Bruno's alcoholism and the limited cultural life of the small town contributed to Handke's antipathy to habit and restrictiveness.
In 1954 Handke was sent to the Catholic Marianum boys' boarding school at Tanzenberg Castle in Sankt Veit an der Glan, Carinthia. Here, he published his first writing in the school newspaper, Fackel. In 1959, he moved to Klagenfurt, where he went to high school, and in 1961, he commenced law studies at the University of Graz.
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