Olga Tokarczuk

Early life, and education

Olga Tokarczuk was born in Sulechów near Zielona Góra, in western Poland. She is the daughter of two teachers, Wanda Słabowska and Józef Tokarczuk, and has a sister. Her parents were resettled from former Polish eastern regions after World War II; one of her grandmothers was of Ukrainian origin. The family lived in the countryside in Klenica, 11 miles from Zielona Góra, where her parents taught at the People's University and her father ran a school library where she found her love of literature. Her father was a member of the Polish United Workers' Party. As a child, Tokarczuk liked Henryk Sienkiewicz's novel In Desert and Wilderness and fairy tales, among others. Her family later moved to Kietrz in Opolian Silesia, where she graduated from the C.K. Norwid high school. In 1979, she debuted with two short stories published in the youth scouting magazine Na Przełaj (No. 39, under the pseudonym Natasza Borodin).

Tokarczuk went on to study clinical psychology at the University of Warsaw in 1980, and during her studies, she volunteered in an asylum for adolescents with behavioral problems. After graduation in 1985, she moved to Wrocław and later Wałbrzych, where she worked as a psychotherapist in 1986–89 and teachers' trainer in 1989–96. In the meantime, she published poems and reviews in the press and a book of poetry in 1989. Her works were awarded at Walbrzych Literary Paths (1988, 1990). Tokarczuk quit to concentrate on literature. She said she felt "more neurotic than my clients". She did odd jobs in London for a while, improving her English, and had literary scholarships in the United States (1996) and in Berlin (2001/02).

Literary career

Early works

Tokarczuk's first book, the poetry collection Miasta w lustrach (Cities in Mirrors), was published in 1989. Her debut novel, Podróż ludzi księgi (The Journey of the Book-People), was published in 1993. A parable on two lovers' quest for the "secret of the Book"—a metaphor for the meaning of life—it is set in the 17th century and portrays an expedition to a monastery in the Pyrenees on the trail of a book that reveals the mystery of life, ending with an ironic twist. It was well received by critics and won the Polish Publisher's Prize for best debut.

Tokarczuk's next novel, E.E. (1995), plays with the conventions of the modernist psychological novel, and takes its title from the initials of its protagonist, the adolescent Erna Eltzner, who develops psychic abilities. Growing up in a wealthy German-Polish family in the 1920s in Wrocław, at that time a German city named Breslau, she allegedly becomes a medium, a fact her mother begins to take advantage of by organizing spiritual sessions. Tokarczuk introduces the characters of scientists, the psychiatrist-patient relationship, and despite elements of spiritualism, occultism, and gnosticism, she represents psychological realism and cognitive scepticism. Katarzyna Kantner, a literary scholar who defended her PhD thesis on Tokarczuk's work, points to Jung's doctoral dissertation On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena as an inspiration.

Primeval and Other Times

Tokarczuk's third novel, Primeval and Other Times (Prawiek i inne czasy, Eng. 2010), was published in 1996 and was highly successful. It is set in the fictitious village of Primeval at the very heart of Poland, which is populated by eccentric, archetypical characters. The village, a microcosm of Europe, is guarded by four archangels, from whose perspective the book chronicles its inhabitants' lives over eight decades, beginning in the year World War I broke out. The book presents the creation of a myth emerging before the reader's eyes. "This is Primeval: an enclosed snow globe, a world in itself, which it may or may not be possible to ever leave. [...] And yet, as much as the town of Primeval is devastated, over and over, by history, there is also a counter dream, full of creaturely magic and wonder." Translated into many languages, with an English version by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Primeval and Other Times established Tokarczuk's reputation as one of the most important representatives of Polish literature in her generation.

After Primeval and Other Times, her work began drifting away from the novel genre toward shorter prose texts and essays. Tokarczuk's next book, Szafa (The Wardrobe, 1997) was a collection of three novella-type stories.

Inspiration and family

Tokarczuk considers herself a disciple of Carl Jung and cites his psychology as an inspiration for her writing.

Since 1998, she has lived between Krajanów and Wrocław, in Lower Silesia. Her home in Krajanów near Nowa Ruda is in the Sudetes mountains at the multicultural Polish-Czech borderland. The locale has influenced her literary work; the novel House of Day, House of Night touches on life in the region, and the action of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead takes place in the picturesque Kłodzko Valley. In 1998, together with her first husband, Tokarczuk founded the Ruta publishing house, which operated until 2004. She was an organizer of the International Short Story Festival, which was inaugurated in Wrocław in 2004. As a guest lecturer, she conducted prose workshops at universities in Kraków and Opole. Tokarczuk joined the editorial team of Krytyka Polityczna (Eng. ed. Political Critique), a magazine as well as a large pan-regional network of institutions and activists, and currently serves on the board of trustees of its academic and research unit, the Institute for Advance Study in Warsaw.

In 2009, Tokarczuk received a literary scholarship from the Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and during her stay at the NIAS campus in Wassenaar, she wrote Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, which was published that year.

Roman Fingas, a fellow psychologist, was Tokarczuk's first husband. They married when she was 23 and later divorced; their son Zbigniew was born in 1986. Grzegorz Zygadło is her second husband. She is a vegetarian.

Olga Tokarczuk Foundation

In November 2019, Tokarczuk established an eponymous foundation with a planned wide range of literature-related activities to create a progressive intellectual and artistic centre. It was declared that Polish poet Tymoteusz Karpowicz's villa in Wrocław would be its future seat. Tokarczuk allocated 10% of her Nobel prize money to the body and Agnieszka Holland and Ireneusz Grin have joined the Foundation Council. The foundation started operation in October 2020, implementing educational programs, organizing writing contests and public debates, and funding scholarships for young aspiring writers and international residencies.