Horror, myth and a feminist reworking of Thomas Mann: Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium defies classification

By Anthony Macris, Professor of Creative Writing, University of Technology Sydney

You’ve got to hand it to the Nobel Prize in Literature committee: its citations are masterpieces of brevity and precision. Entire lifetimes of tireless, painstaking effort, thousands of pages written over decades, are summed up in a statement of around 20 words.

The work of Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, the 2018 Nobel Laureate, is a case in point. The hallowed Swedish academy awarded her the prize “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries…

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