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Weekly Post #4

Introducing Olga Tokarczuk 


On October 10, 2019, the Swedish Academy announced the winners of Nobel Prize in literature for the years 2018 and 2019. Tokarczuk, a writer and public intellectual from Poland won the 2018 award while Peter Handke, an Austrian playwright and scriptwriter has been conferred the 2019 award. 

Olga Tokerczuk is a Polish writer. She was born in 1962 in Sulechow, Poland. She is the author of nine novels and several collections of short-stories and essays. In her works she often deals with the lives at the periphery of society, idea of making roots and home at a new place and sometimes her imagination even evolves toward mythological tales. She portrays a multilingual and religiously plural Poland in her novels which totally opposes the far right ideas of Poland's contemporary toxic political scenario. For this she has faced several death threats. She has been conferred the 2018 Nobel Prize in literature for 'a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.' In 2018, she won the Man Booker International Prize for her novel Flights. Her works have been translated into twenty nine languages till date. 


Introducing a few works by Olga Tokarczuk: 




A) Flights: A fragmentary novel. It was published in 2007 in Polish as Bieguni which refers to runaways. The novel is structured as a series of vignettes, some of them are fictional and some are based on facts. The title refers to a sect of Eastern Orthodox Christians who believe that being in constant motion is a trick to avoid the Evil. 


B) Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead: A novel originally published in 2009 in Polish. The novel was shortlisted for the 2019 International Booker Prize. The novel deals with the story of Janina Duszejko, an ageing woman who lives in a rural Polish village, located near the Czech border in the Silesia region. 


C) The Books of Jacob: In 2015, for this novel, the author was awarded the Nike Literature Award, Poland's highest literary honor. The book unfurls the life of Jacob Frank, the Messianic leader of a mysterious 18th century Jewish splinter group that believed the idea of 'purification through transgression'. 


D) Primeval and Other Times: Published in 1996, this novel is an allegory of Poland's political scenario from 1914 to the contemporary period. The author experiments with magic realism in this work. The novel is set in the mythical Polish village of Primeval. 

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Click here to buy books by Olga Tokarczuk from Amazon, India. 

(This Weekly Post has been contributed by Rajarshi Nath, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Furkating College.) 




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