2018 Nobel Prize in Literature

The 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk "for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life."[1]

Olga Tokarczuk

The prize was awarded in 2019. It was announced by the Swedish Academy on 10 October 2019.[2]

Laureate
Main article: Olga Tokarczuk

Olga Tokarczuk is noted for a mythical tone in her writing and she is often inspired by maps and the perspective from above. Her magnum opus is considered to be the historical novel The Books of Jacob.[3]

Reactions

The choice of Olga Tokarczuk as Nobel Prize Leareate was generally well received. "The Swedish Academy has made many mistakes in recent years", wrote Claire Armistead in The Guardian, "but in the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, it has found not only a fine winner but a culturally important one."[4]

Award ceremony prize presentation

In his award ceremony prize presentation on 10 December 2019 Per Wästberg, member of the Swedish Academy, said of Tokarczuk: "Her fusion of intensive embodiment and ephemeral unreality, intimate observation and mythological obsession, make her one of our time’s most original prose writers, with new ways of viewing reality. She is a virtuoso of instant portraiture, capturing characters in the act of escaping daily life. She writes of what no one else does: “the world’s excruciating strangeness”. "Her prose – drastic, rich in ideas – is in nomadic movement throughout her fifteen or so books. Her villages are centres of the universe, the place a protagonist, its singular destinies woven into a fresco of fable and myth."[5]

Nobel lecture

In her Nobel lecture The Tender Narrator, delivered at the Swedish Academy on 7 December 2019,[6] Olga Tokarczuk spoke about her belief in the power of literature in a world of information overload and divisive narratives.[7] The lecture was named "Emerging Europe's Artistic Achievement 2020" by the organisation Emerging Europe.[8]

References
  1. The Nobel Prize in literature 2018 nobelprize.org
  2. Price announcement nobelprize.org
  3. Olga Tokarczuk nobelprize.org
  4. Claire Armistead Olga Tokarczuk: the dreadlocked feminist winner the Nobel needed The Guardian 10 October 2019
  5. "Award Ceremony speech". nobelprize.org.
  6. Nobel lecture nobelprize.org
  7. The Guardian view on Nobel winner Olga Tokarczuk: light amid the dark The Guardian 13 December 2019
  8. Olga Tokarczuk’s concept of the Tender Narrator named Emerging Europe’s Artistic Achievement 2020 Emerging Europe 2 July 2020
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