Der liebevolle Erzähler

The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Olga Tokarczuk for her narrative imagination, which symbolizes the crossing of boundaries as a way of life with an encyclopedic passion, as announced by the Swedish Academy in October 2019. The author herself learned of her recognition under the strangest circumstances: on the highway between Potsdam and Bielefeld, somewhere in between, at a nameless place. She cannot imagine a better metaphor for the world we live in, says the laureate: I often wonder if it is still possible to describe the world, or if we are helplessly facing its increasingly fluid form, the dissolution of solid reference points and values. The book includes Olga Tokarczuk's essay "How Translators Save the World," which was published in Polish earlier this year, and a chronology of events since October 10, 2019.