Olga Tokarczuk collected her Nobel Prize and Diploma from the hands of the King of Sweden Carl XVI Gustaf

This year’ 14 Nobel Prize winners, including the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2018, received diplomas and medals from the King of Sweden Carl XVI Gustaf.

The Nobel Prize ceremony took place on Tuesday at the Stockholm Philharmonic.

Olga Tokarczuk, a Nobel Prize winner for Literature in 2018, entered the stage as the tenth prize winner.

Tokarczuk was asked to receive the award in Polish by the Nobel Prize winner, Member of the Swedish Academy and Member of the Nobel Committee for Literature, PhD Per Wästberg, who had previously given a laudation in her honour. As he stressed, “Polish literature shines on Europe – several Nobel prizes, and now a bard of global stature and rare breadth, poetic and humourous”. And now it is time for another one, this time for a writer of world renown and an extremely wide range of interests, combining elements of poetry and humour in her work.

Poland, Europe’s crossroads, perhaps its heart – its history exposes to Olga Tokarczuk a victim ravaged by great powers but with its own history of colonialism and anti-semitism. She does not retreat from unpalatable truth, even under threat of death

— said Per Wästberg in his award ceremony speech.

In his opinion, Tokarczuk’s work is characterized by „fusion of intensive embodiment and ephemeral unreality, intimate observation and mythological obsession”. These features

„make her one of our time’s most original prose writers, with new ways of viewing reality”.

The laudator called The Books of Jacob „an extraordinary tale”. He added that „glimpsed in subtext are Tokarczuk’s Jewish heritage and her hope for a Europe without borders for knowledge”.

The writer, wearing a long black velvet dress, received a diploma and a Nobel medal from the hands of King Carl XVI Gustaf. When the Polish Nobel Prize winner received the award, everything went according to plan. There was also a triple bow written in the protocol, which was not successful in 1996 for Wisława Szymborska. The poet made a mistake at this very moment of the ceremony. Olga Tokarczuk performed her three bows without any mistakes.

Tłum. K.J.