Olga Tokarczuk

Olga Tokarczuk is a Polish writer, activist, and public intellectual born on January 29, 1962, in Sulechów, western Poland. Trained as a clinical psychologist at the University of Warsaw, she worked briefly as a psychotherapist before dedicating herself to literature. Influenced by Carl Jung, her writing features mythical tones, explorations of boundaries, and psychological depth. She is known for her leftist, feminist views and criticism of nationalism in Poland. Tokarczuk rose to international prominence with novels including Primeval and Other Times (1996), Flights (2007), Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009), and her magnum opus The Books of Jacob (2014). Her books, translated into nearly forty languages, blend fiction, essays, and nonfiction in an encyclopaedic approach to storytelling. She received the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature—announced in 2019—for 'a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life,' and had previously won the Man Booker International Prize for Flights in 2018.