Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights was announced as the Man Booker International Prize winner on May 22nd. Today the Polish writer and the book’s translator Jennifer Croft spoke to the literary director of the Booker Prize foundation, Gaby Wood. Wood described the book as “crazy in a brilliant way” and referred to Croft and Tokarczuk as “co-winners”. The pair referred to Flights as “our book”, and discussed the book’s translation, the writing process and Tokarczuk’s unique approach to storytelling.
Tokarczuk discussed the influence of Bruno Schulz and Franz Kafka in her work, and described Flights as a “constellation novel”, a term she uses to describe a literary form accommodating many perspectives and possibilities. “Life is very fragmentary now”, she noted. “We are living in different reality, we are jumping from one windows to another”, the writer commented. “We have to invent another form, how to describe the meanings of this new kind of experience, new kind of perception”.
Flights was first published in Polish in 2007 and published in English in 2017. In 2016, the Man Booker International Prize evolved from awarding a writer’s entire oeuvre to prizing a single work of fiction in translation. Tokarczuk has written ten books and her next work to be published in English, Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead, is scheduled for release in Autumn 2018.
If you missed this, you might like to see Kayo Chigonyi today at 1pm.