Peter Handke and Olga Tokarczuk win Nobel Prizes in Literature

Polish author Olga Tokarczuk and Austria's Peter Handke have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2019 and 2018 respectively.

The Swedish Academy, which oversees the prestigious award, suspended it in 2018 after a sexual assault scandal.

Tokarczuk, 57, was recognized "for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life," according to the judges' citation, released Thursday.

And judges said Handke, 76, won "for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience."

The Swedish Academy, the 18-seat committee that selects the Nobel laureates in literature, decided not to hand out a prize last year after a widely publicized sexual assault scandal led to mass resignations and doubts about the academy's legitimacy.