Olga Tokarczuk

Trained as a clinical psychologist and worked in a mental health clinic before writing, and the interest in what a mind does with a story never left.

Flights is assembled from fragments, travel notes, anatomical history and short fiction, and coheres by accumulation rather than plot. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead gives an elderly astrologer in a Polish border village a series of dead hunters and a theory about animals.

She took the Nobel in 2018, awarded a year late. In Poland her comments on the country's colonial history and its treatment of Jews drew death threats and required security, and the state broadcaster covered her prize grudgingly.