Peter Handke

Handke dropped out of law school in Graz once his first novel sold, and made his name at twenty-four with a scandal: Offending the Audience, a plotless play in which actors simply address and insult the crowd, staged in 1966 amid a West German literary establishment he had already denounced from the floor as tired 'descriptive impotence.' A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, written weeks after his mother's suicide in 1971, turned the same formal rigor toward grief.

He kept writing prose, plays, and film scripts, including Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, for decades, but his reputation curdled over vocal support for Slobodan Milošević during the Yugoslav wars, including a eulogy at Milošević's funeral. When the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in 2019, protests followed him to Stockholm. He continues writing from his home outside Paris.