With great joy we received the news of Peter Handke winning the Nobel Prize. This world is full of ugly things and those disgusting journalists from our regions have just brought ugly pictures of destroyed houses, piles of corpses, rotting human bodies. In contrast to them, Handke has opened his eyes to beauty and poured it into poetic texts.

Where others see a child’s shoe sticking out from the ground, he sees a growing flower; where others hear the cries of raped women, he sees an old lady with a mild smile and warm hands; where others see corpses floating in the river, he sees petals of flowers on the sparkling surface of the water; where others see starving wretches in some camp, he sees nests of golden dough, ready to be dropped into the soup. The only brutality he encounters in our regions is the one used against plums: their juicy, wonderful, purple-blue fruits are in these parts unfortunately barbarically burned and turned into šljivovica, which he nevertheless drinks, but not as gladly as observing a plum on a branch.

We are thankful to the great writer for gifting a public swimming pool to Velika Hoča from the prize money of the Ibsen Award and we are therefore convinced that with the Nobel Prize money there will be enough for at least another ten pools – let the people swim! – but we are particularly thankful to him for bringing back beauty and fondness to a place, where others just bring some atrocities. We invite Peter Handke to be our guest on the POLIP 2020 festival and we also would not object if he accompanies his visit with gifting a small swimming pool to Qendra Multimedia.