Olga Tokarczuk

The Swedish Academy awarded Tokarczuk the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature, announced in October 2019, for her narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life. She became the first Polish writer to receive the Nobel Prize since Wisława Szymborska in 1996.

Flights, originally published in Polish as Bieguni in 2007 and translated into English by Jennifer Croft in 2017, is a fragmented novel weaving together stories of travel, human anatomy, and preservation across centuries. It won the Man Booker International Prize in 2018.

Tokarczuk has been a polarizing figure in Poland due to her critical exploration of national myths, particularly in The Books of Jacob (2014), which examines a controversial 18th-century Jewish religious leader in the Ottoman Empire. She received death threats and was denounced by right-wing media for challenging patriotic narratives.

Several major works are available in English, including Flights (translated 2017), Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (translated 2018), and The Books of Jacob (translated 2021). Most of her English translations are handled by Jennifer Croft and Antonia Lloyd-Jones.