Novelist, playwright, poet, essayist and screenwriter, for the last few years referenced repeatedly as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, Peter Handke was born in 1942, in Griffen, Austria. While he was still a student, he began to establish himself as a writer, as a part of the so-called Grazer Gruppe, to which Elfriede Jelinek and Barbara Frischmuth belonged as well. He abandoned his studies in 1965, when the publisher Suhrkamp Verlag accepted to publish his first novel, Die Hornisse. The following year, he began to draw attention with his participation in the Gruppe 47, an avant-garde artists meeting, in Princeton, New Jersey, where he presented his play Publikumsbeschimpfun. About his writing, he wrote in his essay Ich bin ein Bewohner des Elfenbeinturms (I am a Resident of the Ivory Tower): “What I’m interested in is not creating a method based on life, but to find methods. As you know, life makes the best stories, but life can’t write”. He directed two films and worked with Wim Wenders on the scripts of some of his works, such as Wings of Desire. He has several books published in Portugal.
Peter Handke
Writer
