Controversial winner of Nobel Prize in Literature once trashed the award

Austrian author Peter Handke, the winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in literature. Photo: AP

Peter Handke, the controversial winner of this year's Nobel Prize in Literature, once called for the award to be abolished, telling Austrian media in 2014 that the prize brings its winner "false canonisation" along with "one moment of attention (and) six pages in the newspaper".

It's not the first time the Austrian novelist, playwright and poet has shown himself to be an iconoclast. He once described Thomas Mann, a giant of German literature and a 1929 Nobel laureate, as a "terribly bad writer" churning out "condescending, snotty-nosed prose".