Peter Handke: Avant-garde writer, Nobel critic
Austrian Peter Handke, one of the most original German-language writers alive, once used his famously sharp tongue to call for the Nobel Prize in Literature to be abolished.
The prize brings its winner "false canonisation" along with "one moment of attention (and) six pages in the newspaper," the novelist, playwright, poet and translator told Austrian media in 2014.
It was not the first time that Handke had shown himself to be an iconoclast. He has described Thomas Mann, a giant of German literature and a 1929 Nobel laureate, as a "terribly bad writer" churning out "condescending, snotty-nosed prose".
But what really appalled many peers and fans was his attendance at former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic's funeral, and his sympathy for the Serbs in the 1990s Yugoslav wars.
Handke was born in Griffen in southern Austria during World War II on December 6, 1942 to a German soldier father and a mother from Austria's Slovenian minority.
After a few early years in Communist East ...