Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk wins Man Booker Prize 2018 for Flights

Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk won the prestigious Man Booker International Prize for fiction for Flights, a novel that charts multiple journeys in time, space and human anatomy.
Olga Tokarczuk
Olga Tokarczuk

Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk won the prestigious Man Booker International Prize for fiction for Flights, a novel that charts multiple journeys in time, space and human anatomy. The judging panel led by writer Lisa Appignanesi called the Flights a witty, playful novel in which “the contemporary condition of perpetual movement” meets the certainty of death.

The prize is a counterpart to the Man Booker Prize for English-language novels and is open to books in any language that have been translated into English. The 50,000-pound ($67,000) award will be split evenly between the writer and her translator, Jennifer Croft.

The other finalists included Iraqi writer Ahmed Saadawi’s horror story Frankenstein in Baghdad and South Korean author Han Kang’s meditative novel The White Book.

Tokarczuk’s novel combines tales of modern-day travel with the story of a 17th-century anatomist who dissected his own amputated leg and the journey of composer Frederic Chopin’s heart from Paris to Warsaw after his death.

Tokarczuk, one of Poland’s best-known authors, has been criticized by Polish conservatives and has also received death threats for criticizing aspects of the country’s past, including its episodes of anti-Semitism.

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