(1921-2017) – poet, essayist, literary translator from French and English, children’s books author. She debuted in 1936 in the school magazine “W słońce”. A…
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The Book Institute offers translations of excerpts from Olga Tokarczuk’s works in the following languages: English, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Portuguese and Spanish. Interested parties are kindly invited to contact us.
(1962) – writer, essayist, poet, screenwriter, psychologist.
After graduating with a degree in psychology from the University of Warsaw, Olga Tokarczuk worked as a psychotherapist at the Wałbrzych Mental Health Clinic (1986–1989). The following years of her career were spent working at the Methodological Centre in Wałbrzych, where she led her own workshops for teachers, and at the Addiction Treatment Centre in Czarny Bór, working with alcohol addicts. During the first political transformation in Poland, like many people, Tokarczuk emigrated to Western Europe. She ended up working and learning English in the UK. The experiences she gained while studying and working are reflected in her writing.
She made her debut as a prose writer in 1979 in the magazine “Na przełaj”, where she published her first stories – “Świąteczne zabijanie ryby” (Christmas Killing a Fish) and “Moi przyjaciele” (My Friends) – under the pseudonym Natasza Borodin. A decade later, Tokarczuk’s poetry hit the spotlight when her collection was published in “Okolice” under the title “Miasto w lustrach” (City in Mirrors). 1993 saw the release of her first book, “Podróż ludzi Księgi” (The Journey of the Book-People). In 1994, she joined the Polish Writers Association, and remained a member until 2020. 1997 was an exceptional year for Tokarczuk: she received the Kościelski Award and the Polityka Passport Award; the prizes helped build Tokarczuk’s position in the literary world and increased her popularity. Over her career, Tokarczuk has received an impressive list of awards, including the Nobel Prize in Literature (2018) and the Man Booker International Prize (2018). She has also won the Nike Literary Award twice – for “Bieguni” (Flights) in 2008, and for “Księgi Jakubowe” (The Books of Jacob) in 2015 – and the Nike Readers’ Literary Award five times – for “Prawiek i inne czasy” (Primeval and Other Times) in 1997, for “Dom dzienny, dom nocny” (House of Day, House of Night) in 1999, for “Gra na wielu bębenkach” (Playing on Many Drums) in 2002, for “Bieguni” in 2008, and for “Księgi Jakubowe” in 2015. She has received honorary doctorates from the University of Warsaw, the Jagiellonian University and the University of Wrocław, as well as from Sofia University, Hong Kong Baptist University and Sorbonne University. In Norway, Tokarczuk was appointed Arne Næss Chair in Global Justice and the Environment. In 2023, she was awarded the Jerzy Żuławski Literary Award and received an honorary doctorate in Tel Aviv. Tokarczuk has also been awarded the Silver Gloria Artis Medal for Merit to Culture (2010), the Gold Badge of Honour for Merit to the Lower Silesian Voivodeship (2018), the Badge of Honor of Kłodzko County (2019), and the Medal of the Senate of the Republic of Poland (2019). She is an honorary citizen of the City and Commune of Bardo (2005), Nowa Ruda (2009), Wrocław (2019), Warsaw (2020) and Kraków (2021).
Both Tokarczuk’s parents were teachers, and her own teaching career began with delivering workshops for teachers in Wałbrzych and leading a humanities seminar at the Wałbrzych Higher School of Management and Entrepreneurship. In later years, she also taught classes at the Literature and Arts School of the Jagiellonian University, and from 2008, creative writing classes at the University of Opole. After her prose debut in 1998, she founded a publishing house, Ruta, with her first husband, Roman Fingas. The aim of the new venture was to contribute to the decentralisation of the book market, and to ramp up cultural opportunities beyond the cities with great literary traditions – they also opened a book shop of the same name in Wałbrzych. Unfortunately, in 2024, Ruta ceased operations. As well as publishing the works of Tokarczuk herself (“Dom dzienny, dom nocny”; “Szafa” (The Wardrobe); “Gra na wielu bębenkach”), Ruta also published books by Karol Maliszewski, Grzegorz Strumyk, Tamara Bołdak-Janowska and Jarosław Klejnocki, as well as an anthology of online poetry. In addition to a distinctive artistic form, Ruta’s books were also characterised by exceptional attention to graphic design. Following on from her independent publishing career, Tokarczuk joined the major Polish publishing house Wydawnictwo Literackie.
Tokarczuk is also the driving force behind numerous literary events. She was the originator of the International Short Story Festival in Wrocław (2004). Today, the most popular of Olga Tokarczuk’s initiatives is the Mountains of Literature Festival. Between 2015 and 2020, the festival was organised by the Mount Babel Cultural Association and its manager, Beata Kłossowska-Tyszka; since 2021, it has been run by the Olga Tokarczuk Foundation. The foundation promotes numerous initiatives that are invaluable for contemporary literary life. One of them is a return to the idea of the 1990s, reviving and sustaining life in the so-called “little homelands”. Animating the Wałbrzych region has been one of Tokarczuk’s most important focuses for decades. She is also no stranger to editorial work, having been a member of the editorial team of the quarterly “Krytyka Polityczna”. In addition, she sits on the jury of the European Poet of Freedom initiative, which is driven by the idea of “connecting and popularising various communities, languages and literary visions of our world”.
Tokarczuk is celebrated for her versatility. As well as prose, poetry and essays, drama is another key area of her work; she made her debut as a playwright in 2000 with “Skarb” (Treasure), a play written for television. In 2018, at the request of the Kraków Festival Office, she wrote a libretto for an opera – an adaptation of her novel “Anna In w grobowcach świata” (Anna In in the Tombs of the World). Six years after its stage premiere, “ahat ilī. Siostra bogów” (Ahat Ilī: Sister of Gods) was published in book form.
Tokarczuk’s Nobel Prize speech can be considered the key to her work. In it, she presents her understanding of the place of humans in the world, and the role of literature; she professes her belief in the truth contained in literary fiction, and gives her definition of the tender narrator (later developed in a separate book):
“I also dream of a new kind of narrator – a ‘fourth-person’ one, who is not merely a grammatical construct of course, but who manages to encompass the perspective of each of the characters, as well as having the capacity to step beyond the horizon of each of them, who sees more and has a wider view, and who is able to ignore time. Oh yes, I think this narrator’s existence is possible.
Have you ever wondered who the marvellous storyteller is in the Bible who calls out in a loud voice: ‘In the beginning was the word’? Who is the narrator who describes the creation of the world, its first day, when chaos was separated from order, who follows the serial about the origin of the universe, who knows the thoughts of God, is aware of his doubts, and with a steady hand sets down on paper the incredible sentence: ‘And God saw that it was good’? Who is this, who knows what God thought?
Leaving aside all theological doubts, we can regard this figure of a mysterious, tender narrator as miraculous and significant. This is a point of view, a perspective from where everything can be seen. Seeing everything means recognising the ultimate fact that all things that exist are mutually connected into a single whole, even if the connections between them are not yet known to us. Seeing everything also means a completely different kind of responsibility for the world, because it becomes obvious that every gesture ‘here’ is connected to a gesture ‘there’, that a decision taken in one part of the world will have an effect in another part of it, and that differentiating between ‘mine’ and ‘yours’ starts to be debatable.
So it could be best to tell stories honestly in a way that activates a sense of the whole in the reader’s mind, that sets off the reader’s capacity to unite fragments into a single design, and to discover entire constellations in the small particles of events. To tell a story that makes it clear that everyone and everything is steeped in one common notion, which we painstakingly produce in our minds with every turn of the planet.
Literature has the power to do this. We should drop the simplistic categories of highbrow and lowbrow literature, popular and niche, and take the division into genres very lightly. We should drop the definition of ‘national literatures’, knowing as we do that the universe of literature is a single thing, like the idea of unus mundus, a common psychological reality in which our human experience is united. The Author and the Reader perform equivalent roles, the former by dint of creating, the latter by making a constant interpretation.”
Tokarczuk’s work has been adapted into the language of film and theatre. Films based on her short stories include Ryszard Brylski’s “Żurek” (White Soup, 2003), and Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s “Aria Diva” (based on “Ariadna na Naksos” (Ariadne on Naxos, 2007). Adam Uryniak used parts of “Bieguni” in the film “Zniknięcie” (The Vanishing, 2011), and Izabela Kiszczak’s etude “Glicynia” (Wisteria, 2016) is based on the short story of the same name from “Gra na wielu bębenkach”. Tokarczuk adapted her novel “Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych” (Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead) for the screen herself, resulting in the film “Pokot” (Spoor, 2017), for which she also co-authored the screenplay with Agnieszka Holland. Tokarczuk also wrote the script for one of the five stories in the film “Erotica 2022” – “Znikanie pani B.” (The Disappearance of Mrs B.) – directed by Anna Kazejak (2020).
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