Olga Tokarczuk was born in Sulechów in Poland, and lives in Wrocław. Her parents were teachers, and her father also functioned as school librarian. In the library she read pretty much everything she could get hold of and it was here that she developed her literary appetite. After studies in psychology at the University of Warsaw she made her debut as a fiction writer 1993 with The Journey of the Book-People. Her real breakthrough came in 1996 with her third novel (Primeval and Other Times).

Tokarczuk is inspired by maps and a perspective from above, which tends to make her microcosmos a mirror of macrocosmos. She constructs her novels in a tension between cultural opposites: nature versus culture, reason versus madness, male versus female, home versus alienation. Her magnum opus so far is the historical novel (The Books of Jacob), portraying the 18th-century mystic and sect leader Jacob Frank. The work also gives us a remarkably rich panorama of an almost neglected chapter in European history.

She received the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.”

More about Olga Tokarczuk and the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Photo: Karpati & Zarewicz ZAiKS