Peter Handke is the kind of novelist, screen writer and playwright who probably wouldn’t exist in the United States. His radical political views and writing style make him part of a uniquely Austrian avant-garde writers working today.

I was first introduced to Handke’s work when I was studying abroad in Vienna. We started by reading his the work of his counterpart, Elfriede Jelinek. The pair were both members of the hugely influential Grazer Gruppe (the Graz Author Assembly) during Handke university days. Jelinek won the Nobel Prize for literature, but said that Handke was the writer who actually deserved it. Perhaps Jelinek was right, but because of his radical, often anti-western, views, Handke has been denied a number of literary prizes in his lifetime.

Peter Handke was born in 1942 in Griffen, Austria. He went to Catholic school and then went on to attend the University of Graz. His first book, Die Hornissen (The Hornets), was published in 1965.

His most famous piece of writing is probably A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, a short, autobiographical account about his mother’s life and eventual suicide. She was Slovenian, and grew up with a poor father who worked out to procure a house and life for his family. She met and married a WWII soldier and became pregnant with Peter. She married another soldier, later, a man who beat her and drank. His mother killed herself with an overdose of sleeping pills at the age of 51. Handke wrote the book in two months in 1972.

Handke’s writing has been overlooked a number of times because of his political views. In a 1996 essay called A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia, he attacks the Western media for poorly representing Serbia as a victim of the Balkan War, rather than its perpretrator. In 2006, Handke also spoke at Slobodan Milošević’s funeral—in Serbian—defending the Yugoslavian president as someone who was misrepresented by the media and the world.

In 2006, Handke was denied the Heinrich Heine Prize for literature, and the 50,000 Euro prize that went along with it. The council who picked a winner ruled against Handke’s win because of his support of the Yugoslavian president.

Handke has lived all over Europe and the United States. He lived in Salzburg, Austria from 1979 to 1988. He has been living in Chaville, near Paris, for the last twenty years. Handke has two daughters.