Olga Nawoja Tokarczuk is a Polish writer, activist, and public intellectual. She is one of the most critically acclaimed and successful authors of her generation in Poland. She was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Polish female prose writer for "a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life". For her novel Flights, Tokarczuk was awarded the 2018 Man Booker International Prize. Her works include Primeval and Other Times, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, and The Books of Jacob.
Tokarczuk in 2019
Tokarczuk in Kraków, Poland (2005)
Tokarczuk (left) and director Agnieszka Holland in 2017
Tokarczuk during presentation of movie Spoor at the Berlinale 2017
2018 Nobel Prize in Literature
The 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk "for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life." The prize was announced the following year by the Swedish Academy on 10 October 2019. Tokarczuk is the fifth Nobel laureate in Literature from Poland writing in Polish, after the poet Wisława Szymborska in 1996, and Czesław Miłosz in 1980.
"for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life."
Olga Tokarczuk and her translator Jennifer Croft with Lisa Appignanesi, Chair of the judges for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize.
Author Olga Tokarczuk at the presentation of the Polish movie Spoor at the 67th Berlin International Film Festival.
Arnault in Stockholm District Court during the last day of the trial in September 2018.