Olga Tokarczuk

Olga Nawoja Tokarczuk (born 29 January 1962) is a Polish writer, activist, and public intellectual.

She is one of the most critically acclaimed and successful authors of her generation in Poland.

In 1979, she debuted with two short stories in prose published in youth scouting magazine Na Przełaj (No. 39, under the pseudonym Natasza Borodin).

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 behavioural problems.

After graduation in 1985, she moved to Wrocław and later to Wałbrzych, where she worked as a psychotherapist in 1986–89 and teachers' trainer in 1989–96.

They married when she was 23 and later divorced; their son Zbigniew was born in 1986.

Grzegorz Zygadło is her second husband.

Her works were awarded at Walbrzych Literary Paths (1988, 1990).

Tokarczuk quit to concentrate on literature, she also said she felt "more neurotic than [her] clients."

In the meantime, she published poems and reviews in the press and published a book of poetry in 1989.

She worked doing odd jobs in London for a while, improving her English, and went for literary scholarships in the United States (1996) and in Berlin (2001/02).

Tokarczuk considers herself a disciple of Carl Jung and cites his psychology as an inspiration for her literary work.

Since 1998, she has lived between Krajanów and Wrocław, in Lower Silesia.

Her home in Krajanów near Nowa Ruda is located in the Sudetes mountains at the multi-cultural Polish-Czech borderland.

The locale has influenced her literary work; the novel House of Day, House of Night (1998) touches on life in the adopted home, and the action of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009) 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 (Eng. ed. Political Critique), 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 – Institute for Advance Study in Warsaw.

She has also travelled around the world.

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 her novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, which was published the same year.

Roman Fingas, a fellow psychologist, was Tokarczuk's first husband.

In 2015, she received the German-Polish Bridge Prize for her contribution to mutual understanding between European nations.

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, as well as other books with shorter prose works.

For Flights and The Books of Jacob, she won the Nike Awards, Poland's top literary prize, among other accolades; she has also won the Nike audience award five times.

Tokarczuk faced some backlash from nationalist groups in her homeland after the publication of The Books of Jacob, which is set in 18th-century Poland, because the novel celebrates the country's cultural diversity.

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 that year, the novel was shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize.

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 the Second World War; one of her grandmothers was of Ukrainian origin.

The family lived in the countryside in Klenica, some 11 mi away from Zielona Góra, where her parents taught at the People's University and her father also ran a school library in which 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 popular novel In Desert and Wilderness and fairy tales, among others.

Her family later moved south-east to Kietrz in Opolian Silesia, where she graduated from the C.K. Norwid high school.

In 2019, she was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Polish female prose writer for "a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life".