Peter Handke: 80th Birthday on December 6, 2022

Handke is one of the most famous, provocative, celebrated, widely translated contemporary German-language authors. In 2019, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature »for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.«

Peter Handke was born in Griffen (Corinthia) in 1942. His family on his mother’s side was part of the Slovenian minority in Austria; his father, a German, had come to Carinthia after World War II. Between 1954 and 1959, Handke attended secondary school in Tanzenberg. After graduating, he began to study law in Graz in 1961. In March 1966, Peter Handke quit his studies before the final exam and published his debut novel The Hornets. That same year, his by now legendary play Offending the Audience was staged by Claus Peymann in Frankfurt am Main.

Since then, he has written more than thirty short stories and works of prose, including The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1970), A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (1972), The Long Way Around (1979), Repetition (1986), My Year In No Man's Bay (1994) and most recently The Second Sword (2020), My Day in the Other Country (2021) and Zwiegespräch (2022). On the occasion of the author’s 80th birthday, Suhrkamp Verlag published The Time and The Spaces, Handke’s notebook from April 24 – August 26, 1978, as a complete transcript for the first time.

His many achievements as a playwright include the works The Ride Across Lake Constance (1971), Walk About the Village (1981), the dramatic epic Storm Still (2011), The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez (2012), The Innocent, Me and the Unknown Woman by the Side of the Road (2016) and most recently Zdeněk Adamec (2020), which premiered at the Salzburg Festival.

Beyond his own literary creations, Peter Handke has also translated many works of prose and plays into the German: plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides from Greek, by Emmanuel Bove, René Char and Francis Ponge from French, and by Walker Percy from English.

Handke's works have been honoured with numerous national and international prizes. In 2007, he explained the variety of forms, the changing themes, the use of different genres (Handke is also a poet, essayist, screenwriter and director) in his oeuvre: »Ein Künstler ist nur dann ein exemplarischer Mensch, wenn man an seinen Werken erkennen kann, wie das Leben verläuft. Er muß durch drei, vier, zeitweise qualvolle Verwandlungen gehen.« (»An artist is only an exemplary person when his works allow us to realise how life works. He must pass throuth three, four, sometimes agonizing transformations.«)

We congratulate our author on this joyous occasion and wish him many happy returns.