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Olga Nawoja Tokarczuk (; born 29 January 1962) is a Polish writer, activist, and public intellectual. She is one of the most critically acclaimed and successful authors of her generation in Poland. In 2019, 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 is noted for the mythical tone of her writing. A clinical psychologist from the University of Warsaw, she has published a collection of poems, several novels, as well as other books with shorter prose works. For Flights and The Books of Jacob, she won the , Poland's top literary prize, among other accolades; she won the Nike audience award five times. In 2015, she received the German-Polish Bridge Prize for her contribution to mutual understanding between European nations.
Her works have been translated into almost 40 languages, making her one of the most translated contemporary Polish writers. The Books of Jacob, regarded as her Masterpiece, was released in the UK in November 2021 after seven years of translation work, followed by release in the US in February 2022. In March that year, the novel was shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize.
Tokarczuk went on to study clinical psychology at the University of Warsaw in 1980, and during her studies, she volunteered in an asylum for adolescents with behavioural problems. After graduation in 1985, she moved to Wrocław and later to Wałbrzych, where she worked as a Psychotherapy in 1986–89 and teachers' trainer in 1989–96. In the meantime, she published poems and reviews in the press and published a book of poetry in 1989. Her works were awarded at Walbrzych Literary Paths (1988, 1990). Tokarczuk quit to concentrate on literature, she also said she felt "more neurotic than her clients". She worked doing odd jobs in London for a while, improving her English, and went for literary scholarships in the United States (1996) and in Berlin (2001/02).
Since 1998, she has lived between Krajanów and Wrocław, in Lower Silesia. Her home in Krajanów near Nowa Ruda is located in the Sudetes mountains at the multi-cultural Polish-Czech borderland. The locale has influenced her literary work; the novel House of Day, House of Night (1998) touches on life in the adopted home, and the action of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009) takes place in the picturesque Kłodzko Valley. In 1998, together with her first husband, Tokarczuk founded the Ruta Small press, which operated until 2004. She was an organizer of the International Short Story Festival, which was inaugurated in Wrocław in 2004. As a guest lecturer, she conducted prose workshops at universities in Kraków and Opole. Tokarczuk joined the editorial team of Krytyka Polityczna (Eng. ed. Political Critique), a magazine as well as a large pan-regional network of institutions and activists, and currently serves on the Board of trustees of its academic and research unit – Institute for Advance Study in Warsaw. She has also travelled around the world.
In 2009, Tokarczuk received a literary scholarship from the Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and during her stay at the NIAS campus in Wassenaar, she wrote her novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, which was published the same year.
Roman Fingas, a fellow psychologist, was Tokarczuk's first husband. They married when she was 23 and later divorced; their son Zbigniew was born in 1986. Grzegorz Zygadło is her second husband. She is a vegetarian.
The follow-up novel, E.E. (1995), plays with the conventions of the modernist psychological novel, and took its title from the initials of its protagonist, the adolescent Erna Eltzner, who develops psychic abilities. Growing up in a wealthy German-Polish family in the 1920s in Wrocław, which was at that time a German city named Breslau, she allegedly becomes a medium, a fact her mother begins to take advantage of by organizing Mediumship. Tokarczuk introduces the characters of scientists, the psychiatrist-patient relationship, and despite elements of spiritualism, as well as gnosticism, she represents psychological realism and cognitive Skepticism. Katarzyna Kantner, a literary scholar who defended her PhD thesis on the works of Olga Tokarczuk, points to C. G. Jung's doctoral dissertation "On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena" as an inspiration.
After Primeval and Other Times, her work began drifting away from the novel genre towards shorter prose texts and essays. Tokarczuk's next book Szafa (The Wardrobe, 1997) was a collection of three novella-type stories.
Regarding the historical and ideological divides of Polish literature, the book has been characterized as anti-Sienkiewicz. It was soon acclaimed by critics and readers alike, but its reception has been hostile in some Polish nationalism circles and Olga Tokarczuk became a target of some internet hate and harassment campaign.
In 2015, after the publication of The Books of Jacob, Tokarczuk was criticized by the Nowa Ruda Patriots association, who demanded that the town's council revoke the writer's honorary citizenship of Nowa Ruda because, as the association claimed, she had tarnished the good name of the Polish nation. Those people's postulate was supported by Senator Waldemar Bonkowski of the Law and Justice Party, according to whom Tokarczuk's literary output and public statements are in "absolute contradiction to the assumptions of the Polish historical politics". Tokarczuk asserted that she is the true patriot, not the people and groups who criticize her, and whose alleged xenophobic and racist attitudes and actions are harmful to Poland and its image abroad.
In 2020, she was one of the signatories alongside other prominent writers such as Margaret Atwood, John Banville and J. M. Coetzee of an open letter addressed to the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, urging the European Union "to take immediate steps to defend core European values – equality, non-discrimination, respect for minorities – which are being blatantly violated in Poland" and appealing to the Polish government to stop targeting sexual minorities and to withdraw support from organizations promoting homophobia.
Her first recognition, in 2004, was for the English translation (by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) of her 1998 novel House of Day, House of Night, which was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award.
Five of Tokarczuk's books were finalists for the Nike Award, the most important Polish literary accolade, and two of them won the prize : Flights in 2008, and The Books of Jacob in 2015.
In 2010, Tokarczuk received the Silver Medal for Merit to Culture – Gloria Artis. In 2013, she was awarded the Slovenia Vilenica Prize.
She is the recipient of the 2015 Brückepreis, the 20th edition of the award granted by the "Europa-City Zgorzelec/Görlitz". The prize is a joint undertaking of the German and Polish border twin cities aimed at advancing mutual, regional and European peace, understanding and cooperation among people of different nationalities, cultures and viewpoints. Particularly appreciated by the jury was Tokarczuk's creation of literary bridges connecting people, generations and cultures, especially residents of the border territories of Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic, who have had often different existential and historical experiences. Also stressed was Tokarczuk's "rediscovery" and elucidation of the complex multinational and multicultural past of the Lower Silesia region, an area of great political conflicts. Attending the award ceremony in Görlitz, Tokarczuk was impressed by the positive and pragmatic attitude demonstrated by the mayor of the German town regarding the current refugee and migrant crisis, which she contrasted with the ideological uproar surrounding the issue in Poland.
For The Books of Jacob, Tokarczuk was awarded the 2016 Kulturhuset Stadsteatern International Literary Prize in Stockholm. The French translation of the novel was recognized as the 2018 "Best European novel" by France's cultural magazine Transfuge. It also won the 2018 Swiss Jan Michalski Prize, and the 2019 French Prix Laure Bataillon for the best foreign-language book translated in the previous year.
In 2018, Flights (English translation by Jennifer Croft) was awarded the Man Booker International Prize. A year later, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize.
In 2019, Olga Tokarczuk was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature for "a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life". (see below)
In 2020, she received the title of an Honorary Citizen of Warsaw as a recognition of her literary achievements.
In 2021, Tokarczuk received the titles of a Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Warsaw, University of Wrocław, and then from the Kraków's Jagiellonian University. She also became Honorary Citizen of Kraków.
She was elected a Royal Society of Literature International Writer in November 2021.
In March 2022, The Books of Jacob (translated by Jennifer Croft) was longlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize, subsequently being shortlisted in April. In June 2022, she was awarded an Honorary Degree from the Sofia University and in May 2023 from the Tel Aviv University.
In September 2024, the Europese Literatuurprijs was awarded to her latest book The Empusium.
The choice of Tokarczuk was generally well received. "The Swedish Academy has made many mistakes in recent years", Claire Armitstead wrote in The Guardian, "but in the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, it has found not only a fine winner but a culturally important one." In Poland, reactions were divided after Tokarczuk's win.
Olga Tokarczuk delivered her Nobel Lecture, The Tender Narrator, at the Swedish Academy on 7 December 2019. Nobel lecture nobelprize.org In it she spoke about her belief in the power of literature in a world of information overload and divisive narratives. The Guardian view on Nobel winner Olga Tokarczuk: light amid the dark The Guardian 13 December 2019
At the award ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December 2019, Per Wästberg of the Swedish Academy said of Tokarczuk:
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