Polish author Olga Tokarczuk wins prestigious 2018 Man Booker International Prize for fiction

Polish author Olga Tokarczuk has won the prestigious 2018 Man Booker International Prize for fiction for her novel ‘Flights’. The novel, translated by Jennifer Croft, interweaves narratives of travel with explorations of the human body. It combines tales of modern-day travel with the story of a 17th century anatomist who dissected his own amputated leg and the journey of composer Frederic Chopin’s heart from Paris to Warsaw after his death. Tokarczuk is the first Polish author to have won the prestigious award that honours the finest works of translated fiction from around the world. The prize is a counterpart to the Man Booker Prize for English-language novels and is open to books in any language that have been translated into English. The £50,000 ($67,000) award is split evenly between the writer and her translator, Jennifer Croft.