She is the author of eight novels and two short story collections and has been translated into a dozen languages. Tokarczuk also received a Nike in 2009 for Flights. In 2015 she received the Brueckepreis and the prestigious annual literary award from Poland’s Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, as well as Poland’s highest literary honour, the Nike and the Nike Readers’ Prize. Olga Tokarczuk is one of Poland’s best and most beloved authors. This is one of the most important Polish books I have read for years.”
“I have always considered her a person of great literary abilities. Wrong – they were off rediscovering the world on your behalf, just as Olga Tokarczuk does.” “Reading Flights is like finally hearing from a weird old best friend you lost touch with years ago and assumed was gone forever because people that amazing and inventive just don’t last. “One among a very few signal European novelists of the past quarter-century.” – Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Prize in Literature laureate 2015 With her signature grace and insight, Olga Tokarczuk guides the reader beyond the surface layer of modernity and towards the core of the very nature of humankind. In the present we have the trials of a wife accompanying her much older husband as he teaches a course on a cruise ship in the Greek islands, and the harrowing story of a young husband whose wife and child mysteriously vanish on a holiday on a Croatian island. In the nineteenth century, we follow Chopin’s heart as it makes the covert journey from Paris to Warsaw.
From the eighteenth century, we have the story of a North African-born slave turned Austrian courtier stuffed and put on display after his death. From the seventeenth century, we have the story of the Dutch anatomist Philip Verheyen, who dissected and drew pictures of his own amputated leg. It interweaves travel narratives and reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration. Read an excerpt from Flights in The Calvert Journal here.įlights by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croftįlights, a novel about travel in the twenty-first century and human anatomy, is Olga Tokarczuk’s most ambitious to date.
This event is supported by the Polish Cultural Institute. The book’s translator Jennifer Croft will also be on hand for a reading. She’ll be in conversation with James Woodall of The Economist about the book, her literary career, and a range of topics explored in Flights, which intertwines travel narratives with observations on the body, life and death, and the very nature of humankind. Many consider Olga Tokarczuk to be the most important Polish writer of her generation. Join us and Fitzcarraldo Editions at the Calvert 22 Bookshop for the launch of Olga Tokarczuk‘s latest book of stories Flights, which was awarded Poland’s biggest literary prize, the Nike.
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