Anna Gopsill (2019)
Public Anthropologist
Anna Gopsill, PhD candidate, University of London and Communications Assistant, CMI, has recently published a blog “An Ideal Direction? The Nobel Prize to Peter Handke” in the Public Antropologist.
The Nobel Prize for Literature 2019 was awarded to the Austrian Peter Handke for “an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.” However, beyond his literary merit, Handke is well-known for his revisionist interpretation of the 1990s conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Despite the ICTY clearly acknowledging the perpetration of genocide and evidence that genocide was perpetrated in Bosnia-Herzegovina, denialism and revisionism are still widespread. Sceptics claim that genocide was a result of international conspiracy, the numbers of victims were heavily inflated or that it never happened at all.
Anna Gopsill argues that awarding this esteemed prize to someone who is known to have denied genocide is a dangerous precedent to set.
Read the whole blog here.
Photo: Jelle Visser, flickr