Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk flies high with Nobel Prize win

One of Poland’s leading authors, Olga Tokarczuk, has been named winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2018.

Tokarczuk was lauded by the committee for “a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.”

The 56 year-old author will be formally awarded the $1 million prize on 10 December.

The prize follows Tokarczuk’s rise to international fame after scooping the 2018 International Man Booker Prize for her novel Flights.

Tokarczuk’s other titles translated into English include House of Day, House of Night, The Books of Jacob, Primeval and Other Times, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.

The Polish novelist was given the award at the same time as Austrian author Peter Handke, who received the 2019 prize for “an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.” The Swedish Academy awarded two Nobel Prizes this year, having scrapped last year’s ceremony amid a sexual harassment scandal.

Other favourites in the competition included Polish writer Hanna Krall, Romanian writer Mircea Cartarescu, Canadian poet Anne Carson and novelist Margaret Atwood, French-Guadeloupean Maryse Conde, Antiguan-American author Jamaica Kincaid, South Korean Han Kang and Joyce Carol Oates from the United States.