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Portrait of Olga Tokarczuk

Literature · Novelists

Olga Tokarczuk

born 1962 · Polish

Contemporary Polish fiction

Olga Tokarczuk is the leading Polish novelist of her generation and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2018, announced in 2019 after the prize was postponed for a year. Trained as a psychologist and a reader of Jung, she writes fragmentary, digressive books she calls "constellation novels", moving between folklore, history and ecological argument. She has twice won the Nike, Poland's chief literary award, and in 2018 became the first Polish writer to win the International Booker Prize.

How to spot them

  • ▸The "constellation novel": dozens of short, apparently unrelated pieces that form a pattern
  • ▸Trained as a psychologist at the University of Warsaw; a devotee of Jung
  • ▸Lower Silesia, the Czech border and the Kłodzko Valley as settings
  • ▸Nobel citation: a narrative imagination representing "the crossing of boundaries as a form of life"
  • ▸Her translators Jennifer Croft and Antonia Lloyd-Jones are often named in the same question

Key works

Primeval and Other Times (1996)

Prawiek i inni czasy — a mythical Polish village watched over by four archangels through the twentieth century

House of Day, House of Night (1998)

Fragments, dreams and recipes from Nowa Ruda on the Polish-Czech border

Flights (2007)

Bieguni — 116 fragments on travel and anatomy; won the Nike in 2008 and the International Booker Prize in 2018 in Jennifer Croft's translation

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009)

An elderly astrologer and Blake translator investigates hunters' deaths; filmed by Agnieszka Holland as Spoor

The Books of Jacob (2014)

Nearly a thousand pages on the eighteenth-century Jewish messianic claimant Jacob Frank, paginated backwards; won the Nike and was shortlisted for the International Booker in 2022

The Empusium (2022)

A "health resort horror story" set in a Silesian sanatorium in 1913, answering back to Thomas Mann

Key ideas

  • The "constellation novel": meaning made by the pattern between fragments rather than a single plot
  • Animal life and vegetarianism as a moral and political question, argued through crime fiction
  • Poland as a plural, multi-ethnic history rather than a single national story

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born on 29 January 1962 in Sulechów; studied psychology at the University of Warsaw
  • •Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2018, announced in October 2019 alongside the 2019 laureate Peter Handke
  • •The first Polish writer to win the International Booker Prize, for Flights in 2018
  • •Twice a winner of the Nike Award, for Flights and for The Books of Jacob
  • •The Books of Jacob is numbered backwards, from 955 down to 1, in the manner of a Hebrew book
  • •Her remarks about Polish colonial and antisemitic history brought abuse and death threats, and she was given bodyguards
  • •Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead takes its title from William Blake's Proverbs of Hell
  • •She runs a foundation in Wrocław and has founded a literary festival in Wrocław and Nowa Ruda
  • •Agnieszka Holland's film Spoor, adapted from Drive Your Plow, won the Silver Bear Alfred Bauer Prize at Berlin in 2017

Drill it — 8 cards

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Sources