37 Facts About Olga Tokarczuk

Olga Nawoja Tokarczuk is a Polish writer, activist, and public intellectual.

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

Olga Tokarczuk's works include Primeval and Other Times, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, and The Books of Jacob.

Olga Tokarczuk is noted for the mythical tone of her writing.

Olga Tokarczuk's works have been translated into almost 40 languages, making her one of the most translated contemporary Polish writers.

Olga Tokarczuk was born in Sulechow near Zielona Gora, in western Poland.

Olga Tokarczuk's parents were resettled from former Polish eastern regions after the Second World War; one of her grandmothers was of Ukrainian origin.

Olga Tokarczuk's father was a member of the Polish United Workers' Party.

Olga 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.

Olga Tokarczuk's works were awarded at Walbrzych Literary Paths.

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

Olga Tokarczuk worked doing odd jobs in London for a while, improving her English, and went for literary scholarships in the United States and in Berlin.

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

In 1998, together with her first husband, Olga Tokarczuk founded the Ruta publishing house, which operated until 2004.

In 2009, Olga 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.

Olga Tokarczuk introduces the characters of scientists, the psychiatrist-patient relationship, and despite elements of spiritualism, occultism as well as gnosticism, she represents psychological realism and cognitive scepticism.

Olga Tokarczuk's next book Szafa was a collection of three novella-type stories.

Olga Tokarczuk's goal is to make those images, fragments of narrative and motif, merge only on entering the reader's consciousness.

Olga Tokarczuk published a volume with three modern Christmas tales, together with her fellow writers Jerzy Pilch and Andrzej Stasiuk.

Olga Tokarczuk decides to investigate the murders of members of the local hunting club and initially explains these deaths as having been caused by wild animals taking revenge on hunters.

Since its foundation in 2015, Olga Tokarczuk has become co-host of the annual Literary Heights Festival, which has included events in her village.

In November 2019, Olga Tokarczuk established an eponymous foundation with a planned wide range of literature-related activities to create a progressive intellectual and artistic centre.

Olga Tokarczuk has been criticized by some nationalist groups in Poland as unpatriotic, anti-Christian and a promoter of eco-terrorism.

Olga Tokarczuk has denied the allegations, has described herself as a "true patriot" and said that groups criticizing her are xenophobic and damage Poland's international reputation.

Olga Tokarczuk has often denounced Poland for having "committed horrendous acts as colonizers, as a national majority that suppressed the minority [Jews], as slaveowners, and as the murderers of Jews".

In 2015, after the publication of The Books of Jacob, Olga Tokarczuk was criticized by the Nowa Ruda Patriots association, who demanded that the town's council revoke the writer's honorary citizenship of Nowa Ruda because, as the association claimed, she had tarnished the good name of the Polish nation.

Olga Tokarczuk asserted that she is the true patriot, not the people and groups who criticize her, and whose alleged xenophobic and racist attitudes and actions are harmful to Poland and its image abroad.

Olga Tokarczuk is the laureate of numerous literary awards both in and outside Poland.

Olga Tokarczuk's works have become the subject of several dozen academic papers and theses.

Five of Olga Tokarczuk's books were finalists for the Nike Award, the most important Polish literary accolade, and two of them won the prize: Flights in 2008, and The Books of Jacob in 2015.

In 2019, Olga Tokarczuk was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature for "a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life".

Olga Tokarczuk was elected a Royal Society of Literature International Writer in November 2021.

In 2019, Olga Tokarczuk was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature for "a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life".

Olga Tokarczuk delivered her Nobel Lecture, The Tender Narrator, at the Swedish Academy on 7 December 2019.

Olga Tokarczuk is a virtuoso of instant portraiture, capturing characters in the act of escaping daily life.

Olga Tokarczuk writes of what no one else does: "the world's excruciating strangeness".

Olga Tokarczuk's villages are centres of the universe, the place a protagonist, its singular destinies woven into a fresco of fable and myth.