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Polish author Olga Tokarczuk and Austrian novelist Peter Handke have been named the 2018 and 2019 winners of Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy announced on Thursday.
The 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature was postponed for a year due to the sexual harassment scandal that shook the Swedish Academy.
Tokarczuk, considered the most talented Polish novelist of her generation, was honoured "for a narrative imagination that with encyclopaedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life".
Handke meanwhile won "for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience," the Academy said.
Handke "has established himself as one of the most influential writers in Europe after the Second World War." His works are filled with a strong desire to discover and to make his discoveries come to life by finding new literary expressions for them, the Academy said.
Tokarczuk and Handke each take home a cheque worth nine million kronor (USD 912,000).
Olga Tokarczuk, the 15th woman to win the Nobel Literature Prize, has won the International Booker Prize in 2018.
The Nobel Literature Prize, considered to be the most prestigious award in the literary world, has been awarded to 116 people since 1901, of which only 15 are women.
Several literary critics had predicted that at least one of the winners would be a woman, after the sexual harassment scandal engulfed the academy.