According to Nobelprize.org the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2018 is awarded to the Polish author Olga Tokarczuk “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopaedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.”

Olga Tokarczuk was born 1962 in Sulechów in Poland, and today 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 ‘Podróż ludzi Księgi’ (‘The Journey of the Book-People’). Her real breakthrough came with her third novel ‘Prawiek i inne czasy’ 1996 (‘Primeval and Other Times’, 2010). The novel is an excellent example of new Polish literature after 1989, resisting moral judgement and unwilling to represent the conscience of the nation. Instead it shows a remarkable gift of imagination with a high degree of artistic sophistication.

The magnum opus of Tokarczuk so far is the impressive historical novel ‘Księgi Jakubowe’ 2014 (‘The Books of Jacob’). Once more the writer changes mode and genre, and has devoted several years of historical research in archives and libraries to make the work possible. Tokarczuk has in this work showed the supreme capacity of the novel to represent a case almost beyond human understanding.

Nobelprize.org/NB

Picture: Krzysztof Dubiel/Instytut Książki