Olga Tokarczuk

Olga Tokarczuk was born in 1962 in Sulechów, in western Poland, the daughter of two teachers whose families had been resettled from Poland’s former eastern territories after the war. She grew up in the countryside near Zielona Góra, where her father ran a school library, and later in Kietrz in Silesia. She studied clinical psychology at the University of Warsaw, volunteering with troubled adolescents, then worked as a therapist in Wałbrzych. Carl Jung remained an abiding influence, and her first book, in 1989, was a collection of poems.

Primeval and Other Times (1996) told the twentieth century through a mythical Polish village guarded by archangels; House of Day, House of Night drew on the Sudeten borderland where she has lived since the late 1990s. With Flights (2007) she developed what she calls the constellation novel: fragments, essays and stories orbiting travel, anatomy and the restless body. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is an eccentric, Blake-haunted crime novel about animals and hunters, filmed by Agnieszka Holland as Spoor. Her largest work, The Books of Jacob (2014), a vast panorama of eighteenth-century Europe centred on the messianic leader Jacob Frank, won the Nike Award, as Flights had.

Flights won the Man Booker International Prize in 2018. The Nobel Prize for 2018 was postponed after a crisis within the Swedish Academy and announced in October 2019, alongside the 2019 award; it honoured a narrative imagination that represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life. An outspoken public intellectual, she has drawn hostility from Polish nationalists for her readings of the country’s history, and she divides her time between Wrocław and the village of Krajanów.