Stating that she used to be proud of the Swedish Academy but all she feels now is shame and guilt, she said: "I witnessed the genocide first-hand 27 years when I was there. I am going to return the Nobel prize over the fact that Peter Handke, who denies the genocide that took place in Bosnia-Herzegovina, received it too."

In 1996, Handke's travelogue A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia created controversy, as Handke portrayed Serbia as being among the victims of the Yugoslav Wars. In the same essay, Handke also attacked Western media for misrepresenting the causes and consequences of the war. In the mid-2000s, Handke's public support of Slobodan Miloseviç, the former president of Yugoslavia who was indicted for war crimes by a UN tribunal for his role in the Yugoslav Wars, was considered controversial in the West, including Handke's delivery of a brief speech (partially in Serbian) at Miloseviç funeral on 18 March 2006. When Handke was awarded the International Ibsen Award in 2014, it caused some calls for the jury to resign, as Handke was widely described by critics in Norwegian media as a fascist with ties to war criminals.

ILKHA