Olga Tokarczuk, Peter Handke won the Nobel Prize for Literature

The Swedish Academy has named Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize for Literature.

It also announced that it was honoring Austrian Peter Handke with the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature.

The Academy cancelled the prize last year after many members fled the organization following sexual abuse accusations linked to it.

The Academy said it awarded Tokarczuk for imaginative writing that “represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.”

The Polish writer’s first published work came in 1989, a book of poetry called Cities in Mirrors.

Her first novel, The Journey of the Book-People, was published in 1993.

Last year, Tokarczuk became the first Polish writer to win Britain’s Man Booker Prize for International Literature for her novel Flights.

Her novel Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, was on the short list of nominees for the 2019 prize as well. That prize went to another writer.

Poland’s finance minister says he will waive the tax expected on the $905,000 prize. The official admitted he has not read any of Tokarczuk’s books but said he was happy at her success.

Tokarczuk has been deeply critical of Poland’s conservative government.

The Swedish Academy said it named Peter Handke winner of the 2018 prize for “influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.”

Handke’s first novel was published in 1966. He also writes plays and is a political activist.

The Austrian writer was an opponent of NATO’s airstrikes against Serbia in the Kosovo war of the late 1990s.

He was a supporter of the Serbian government under the leadership of Slobodan Milosevic.

He has denied that Bosnian Serb troops carried out a campaign of genocide in the killing of 8,000 civilians in Srebrenica during the Bosnian war in the 1990s.