Stockholm: Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk won Thursday the 2018 Nobel Literature Prize, which was delayed over a sexual harassment scandal, while Austrian novelist and playwright Peter Handke took the 2019 award, the Swedish Academy said.
Olga Tokarczuk was honoured ‘for a narrative imagination that with encyclopaedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life’.
Peter Handke won ‘for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience’. The Nobel Committee said in a statement.
Olga Tokarczuk, considered the most talented Polish novelist of her generation, has a string of bestsellers to her name and a style that blends the real with the mystical.
A vegetarian and environmentalist with long, dark dreadlocks, the 57-year-old writer is also a political activist who does not shy away from criticising Poland’s right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) government.
Tokarczuk received death threats in 2015 after telling the Polish media that an open and tolerant Poland was a myth. Her publishers assigned her a security detail for a week.
Tokarczuk’s books portray a polychromatic world perpetually in motion, with characters’ traits intermingled and language that is both precise and poetic.
“I don’t have a clear biography of my own that I could recount in an interesting way. I’m made up of the characters that I pulled out of my head, that I invented,” Tokarczuk said in a recent interview with ‘The Polish Book Institute’. “I’m made up of all of them. I have a huge, multi-frame biography.”
Tokarczuk has written more than a dozen books and won numerous honours, including Britain’s ‘Man Booker International Prize’ last year and Poland’s most prestigious Nike Literary Award – twice. Her books have been turned into plays and films and translated into more than 25 languages, including Catalan, Hindi and Japanese.
Tokarczuk’s first novel, The Journey of the People of the Book, released in 1993, chronicles a failed expedition to find a mysterious book. She won the Booker Prize along with her translator Jennifer Croft for her 2007 novel Flights, whose English version came out in 2017.
AFP