`A troubling choice`: authors criticise Peter Handke`s controversial Nobel win
(The Guardian Austria)

Writers including Salman Rushdie, Hari Kunzru and Slavoj Zizek say the 2019 Nobel laureate `combines great insight with shocking ethical blindness´Olga Tokarczuk: the dreadlocked feminist winner the Nobel neededTwenty years before Peter Handke would become a Nobel laureate, he won another title. In 1999, Salman Rushdie named him the runner-up for `International moron of the year` in the Guardian, for his `series of impassioned apologias for the genocidal regime of Slobodan Milosevi´c`. (The winner was actor Charlton Heston, for being a gun lobbyist.)The Austrian playwright, whose Slovenian heritage had inspired in him a fervent nationalism during the Balkans war, had publicly suggested that Sarajevo´s Muslims had massacred themselves and blamed the Serbs, and denied the Srebrenica genocide. Seven years after Rushdie´s scorching condemnation, in 2006, he would also attend war criminal Milosevi´c´s funeral.More than ever we need public intellectuals who are able to make a robust defence of human rights ... Handke is not such a person Continue reading...