Polish author Olga wins Man Booker Int’l Prize
London: Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk won the prestigious Man Booker International Prize for fiction on Tuesday with Flights, a novel that charts multiple journeys in time, space and human anatomy.
Flights beat five other finalists, including 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 modernday 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.
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.
Tokarczuk is one of Poland’s best- known authors. She has been criticised by Polish conservatives — and received death threats — for criticising aspects of the country’s past, including its episodes of anti- Semitism.
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 ($ 67,000) award is split evenly between the writer and her translator, Jennifer Croft.
Flights recounts a sheaf of stories on Tokarczuk’s theme, including the 17th century tale of Dutch anatomist Philip Verheyen, who dissected and drew pictures of his own amputated leg and the 19th century story of Chopin’s heart as it makes the covert journey from Paris to Warsaw after his death.
British paper The Guardian called the novel “a passionate and enchantingly discursive plea for meaningful connectedness, for the acceptance of ‘ fluidity, mobility, illusoriness’” in its review of June 2017.
— AP, AFP