Olga Tokarczuk
The Nobel Prize in Literature laureate-author for the first time in Greece
Dates
Tickets
Venue
Time & Date
Information
Language
The discussion will be held in Polish with simultaneous interpretation in Greek and Greek sign language.
To receive the translation device, kindly make sure to bring along a valid form of identification, such as a police ID, passport, or any other official document confirming your identity.
Information
Olga Tokarczuk’s books “Primeval and Other Times,” “Flights,” “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead,” and “The Books of Jacob” will be sold in the ground-floor foyer of the Onassis Stegi on the day of the event.
At the end of the event, the writer will sign a limited number of copies.
Pre-booking for Onassis Stegi Friends and general public: from Friday 19 January 2024, 17:00
Introduction
The theatrical season of Onassis Stegi began with one of her works; the new year starts with the artist herself. Three months after the majestic performance of “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead,” the Nobel Prize-winning author joins us at the Onassis Stegi Main Stage in a public discussion about literature, society, and the art of tenderness. The discussion is moderated by the journalist and editor Gregory Bekos.
Freedom / Poland / Humanity / Stories / Athens / Imagination
Author of novels such as “Primeval and Other Times,” “Flights,” and “The Books of Jacob,” Olga Tokarczuk (b. 1962) received the news that she had been awarded the Nobel Prize while being on the road, something absolutely fitting for her case. For through her “extremely witty and intelligent” work, the Polish writer “focuses on migration and the experience of cultural transitions” and was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature by the Swedish Academy for "a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life."
The Onassis Stegi audience was granted the opportunity in October 2023, at the beginning of this season, to experience this crossing of boundaries before its very eyes, thanks to the highly inspired adaptation and direction by Simon McBurney and Complicité troupe of Tokarczuk’s novel “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead,” a performance-cum-seminar on how literature can be sublimated in dramaturgical terms. The work itself, contemplative like an ontological manifesto and darkly comic like a crime thriller farce, is set in the depths of winter in a small community on a remote Polish mountainside. Male members of a local hunting club begin to die under mysterious circumstances, and Janina Duszejko—an eccentric older local woman, environmentalist, amateur astrologist, and avid translator of William Blake—claims that the murders of her hunting neighbors are indeed performed by the animals themselves, like an act of transcendental revenge on the part of nature.
By virtue of a highly personal, distinct, and instantly recognizable style, Tokarczuk merges reality and fiction within her writing practice and mobilizes folk traditions and history, allowing at the same time her dedication to Carl Jung’s theories to come through in order to emerge as the greatest prose writer in Poland nowadays and equally elevate herself to the echelon of the most eminent European creators worldwide.
An author for our times, Tokarczuk, through her restless, transformative, and enchanting stories that transcend time and space, urges us to contemplate the darkest recesses and the brightest capacities of our time. She remains aware and explicitly vocal about political, social, environmental, and ecological issues, having faced, at times, extreme nationalist voices that have accused her, among others, of being a “traitor.” But what happens instead is that she has become an agitating presence for many with her writings and views precisely because she defies several aspects of the nation’s past and many contemporary, widespread beliefs in her country, Europe, and the world.
