Monday, September 24, 2018 – Thursday, October 4, 2018

Events in Washington DC, Boston, New York, Rochester, Minneapolis, Portland, Los Angeles, and San Francisco

“One among a very few signal European novelists of the past quarter-century.” — The Economist

“A household name in Poland and one of Europe’s major humanist writers” — The Guardian

“A writer on the level of W. G. Sebald.” — Annie Proulx

“Every sentence lands with the artful cadence of a poet.” — Deborah Levy, author of Swimming Home

“A magnificent writer.” — Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Prize-winning author of Secondhand Time

“A select few novels possess the wonder of music, and this is one of them.” — Los Angeles Review of Books

Poland’s leading novelist returns to the United States to celebrate the American debut of her award-winning novel Flights.

A seventeenth-century Dutch anatomist discovers the Achilles tendon by dissecting his own amputated leg. Chopin’s heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time.

Flights is Tokarczuk’s first novel to appear in English since 2011 and has immediately been a sensational success, capturing this year’s Man Booker International Prize. A genre-defying “constellation novel,” it is a poetic meditation on travel, immortality and the human condition.

Joining Tokarczuk will be her translator Jennifer Croft, whose powerful translation of Flights won this year’s Found in Translation Award for the best translation of Polish literature into English.

The 2018 Found in Translation Award will be presented on September 27 at the Brooklyn Public Library Dweck Center. Full details can be found here.

Olga Tokarczuk is one of Poland’s most celebrated and beloved authors, a winner of the Man Booker International Prize, as well as her country’s highest literary honor, the Nike. She is the author of eight novels and two short story collections, and has been translated into a dozen languages. Her work has appeared in n+1, BOMB, and Asymptote.

Jennifer Croft is a 2018–19 Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. She is also the recipient of Fulbright, PEN, MacDowell, and National Endowment for the Arts grants and fellowships, as well as the inaugural Michael Henry Heim Prize for Translation and a Tin House Scholarship for her novel Homesick, originally written in Spanish. She holds a PhD from Northwestern University and an MFA from the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, n+1, BOMB, VICE, Guernica, Electric Literature, Lit Hub, The New Republic, The Guardian, The Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere.

Full Tour Details:

Washington, DC
Monday, September 24
With translator Jennifer Croft
Politics and Prose at the Wharf
70 District Sq SW
7pm

Boston, MA
Tuesday, September 25
With translator Jennifer Croft
University of Massachusetts
Boston Wheatley Building
100 William T Morrissey Blvd
2:30pm

Brookline, MA
Tuesday, September 25
With translator Jennifer Croft, in conversation with Askold Melnycuk
Brookline Booksmith
279 Harvard St (corner of Beacon St.)
7pm

Brooklyn, NY
Wednesday, September 26
With translator Jennifer Croft, in conversation with Hermione Hoby
Community Bookstore
143 Seventh Ave, Brooklyn
7pm

Thursday, September 27
With translator Jennifer Croft, in conversation with John Freeman
Including the Presentation of the Found in Translation Award to Jennifer Croft
Brooklyn Public Library – The Dweck Center
10 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn
7:30pm

Rochester, NY
Friday, September 28
Moderated by Sean Bye and Dr. Jakub Czernik.
University of Rochester
Goergen Hall, Sloan Auditorium
Co-Presented by the Skalny Center for Polish and Central European Studies.
7:30pm

Minneapolis, MN
Sunday, September 30
Open Book
1011 Washington Ave South
4pm
Co-Presented by the Polish American Cultural Institute of Minnesota and Rain Taxi

Portland, OR
Tuesday, October 2
Powell’s at Hawthorne
3723 se Hawthorne blvd
7:30pm

West Hollywood, CA
Wednesday, October 3
Book Soup
8818 Sunset Blvd
7pm

San Francisco, CA
Thursday, October 4
With translator Jennifer Croft, in conversation with Michael Holtmann
Green Apple Books on the Park
1231 9th Ave, San Francisco
7:30 pm
Co-Presented by the Center for the Art of Translation