Olga Tokarczuk


Olga Nawoja Tokarczuk is a Polish writer, activist, and public intellectual. She is one of the most critically acclaimed and successful Polish authors of her generation. In 2019, she 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". 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, and books of shorter prose works. For Flights and The Books of Jacob, she won the Nike Award, 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 magnum opus, 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, it was shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize.

Biography

Early life, and education

Olga Tokarczuk was born in Sulechów near Zielona Góra, in western Poland. She is the daughter of two teachers, Wanda Słabowska and Józef Tokarczuk, and has a sister. Her parents were resettled from former Polish eastern regions after World War II; one of her grandmothers was of Ukrainian origin. The family lived in the countryside in Klenica, 11 miles from Zielona Góra, where her parents taught at the People's University and her father ran a school library where she found her love of literature. Her father was a member of the Polish United Workers' Party. As a child, Tokarczuk liked Henryk Sienkiewicz's novel In Desert and Wilderness and fairy tales, among others. Her family later moved to Kietrz in Opolian Silesia, where she graduated from the C.K. Norwid high school. In 1979, she debuted with two short stories published in the youth scouting magazine Na Przełaj.
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 behavioral problems. After graduation in 1985, she moved to Wrocław and later Wałbrzych, where she worked as a psychotherapist in 1986–89 and teachers' trainer in 1989–96. In the meantime, she published poems and reviews in the press and a book of poetry in 1989. Her works were awarded at Walbrzych Literary Paths. Tokarczuk quit to concentrate on literature. She said she felt "more neurotic than my clients". She did odd jobs in London for a while, improving her English, and had literary scholarships in the United States and in Berlin.

Inspiration and family

Tokarczuk considers herself a disciple of Carl Jung and cites his psychology as an inspiration for her writing.
Since 1998, she has lived between Krajanów and Wrocław, in Lower Silesia. Her home in Krajanów near Nowa Ruda is in the Sudetes mountains at the multicultural Polish-Czech borderland. The locale has influenced her literary work; the novel House of Day, House of Night touches on life in the region, and the action of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead takes place in the picturesque Kłodzko Valley. In 1998, together with her first husband, Tokarczuk founded the Ruta publishing house, 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, 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, the Institute for Advance Study in Warsaw.
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 Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, which was published that 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.

Literary career

Early works

Tokarczuk's first book, the poetry collection Miasta w lustrach, was published in 1989. Her debut novel, Podróż ludzi księgi, was published in 1993. A parable on two lovers' quest for the "secret of the Book"—a metaphor for the meaning of life—it is set in the 17th century and portrays an expedition to a monastery in the Pyrenees on the trail of a book that reveals the mystery of life, ending with an ironic twist. It was well received by critics and won the Polish Publisher's Prize for best debut.
Tokarczuk's next novel, E.E., plays with the conventions of the modernist psychological novel, and takes 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, at that time a German city named Breslau, she allegedly becomes a medium, a fact her mother begins to take advantage of by organizing spiritual sessions. Tokarczuk introduces the characters of scientists, the psychiatrist-patient relationship, and despite elements of spiritualism, occultism, and gnosticism, she represents psychological realism and cognitive scepticism. Katarzyna Kantner, a literary scholar who defended her PhD thesis on Tokarczuk's work, points to Jung's doctoral dissertation On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena as an inspiration.

''Primeval and Other Times''

Tokarczuk's third novel, Primeval and Other Times, was published in 1996 and was highly successful. It is set in the fictitious village of Primeval at the very heart of Poland, which is populated by eccentric, archetypical characters. The village, a microcosm of Europe, is guarded by four archangels, from whose perspective the book chronicles its inhabitants' lives over eight decades, beginning in the year World War I broke out. The book presents the creation of a myth emerging before the reader's eyes. "This is Primeval: an enclosed snow globe, a world in itself, which it may or may not be possible to ever leave. And yet, as much as the town of Primeval is devastated, over and over, by history, there is also a counter dream, full of creaturely magic and wonder." Translated into many languages, with an English version by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Primeval and Other Times established Tokarczuk's reputation as one of the most important representatives of Polish literature in her generation.
After Primeval and Other Times, her work began drifting away from the novel genre toward shorter prose texts and essays. Tokarczuk's next book, Szafa was a collection of three novella-type stories.

''House of Day, House of Night'' and other works

House of Day, House of Night is what Tokarczuk calls a "constellation novel", a patchwork of loosely connected, disparate stories, sketches, and essays about life past and present in her adopted home in Krajanów, which allow various interpretations and enable communication at a deeper, psychological level. Her goal is to make those images, fragments of narrative and motif, merge only on entering the reader's consciousness. While some, at least those unfamiliar with Central European history, have called it Tokarczuk's most "difficult" book, it was her first to be published in English and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award in 2004.
House of Day, House of Night was followed by a collection of short stories, Gra na wielu bębenkach and a book-length nonfiction essay, Lalka i perła, about Bolesław Prus's classic novel The Doll. She also published a volume with three modern Christmas tales, together with Jerzy Pilch and Andrzej Stasiuk. Ostatnie historie is an exploration of death from the perspectives of three generations, while the novel Anna in the Tombs of the World was a contribution to the Canongate Myth Series by Polish publisher Znak.

''Flights''

Tokarczuk's novel Flights returns to the patchwork approach of essay and fiction, the major theme of which is modern-day nomads. The book explores how a person moves through time and space as well as the psychology of traveling. Flights received both the jury and the readers' prize of the 2008 Nike Awards, and then the 2018 Man Booker International Prize. The novel landed on the short list for the U.S. National Book Award in the "Translated Literature" category; a panel of judges wrote:

''Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of The Dead''

In 2009, Tokarczuk published the existential, noir thriller novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, an acid social satire that is not a conventional crime story. The main character and narrator is Janina Duszejko, a woman in her 60s living in a rural area in the Polish Kłodzko Valley, eccentric in perception of others through astrology and fond of the poetry of William Blake, from whose work the book's title is taken. She decides to investigate the murders of members of the local hunting club and initially explains them as having been caused by wild animals taking revenge on hunters. The novel was a bestseller in Poland. It was the basis of the crime film Spoor, directed by Agnieszka Holland, which won the Alfred Bauer Prize at the 67th Berlin International Film Festival. The English translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones earned Tokarczuk a second nomination for the Man Booker International Prize. In 2022, a stage version of the novel was produced by the British theatre company Complicité.
File:MJK32706 Olga Tokarczuk.jpg|thumb|upright|alt=Polnische Frauen, Polnische Frau, Polish Women, Polskie kobiety|Tokarczuk during presentation of movie Spoor at the Berlinale 2017