Meet National Book Award Finalists Olga Tokarczuk and Jennifer Croft

The 2018 National Book Awards will be held on Wednesday, November 14 at the 69th National Book Awards Ceremony and Benefit Dinner at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City. In preparation for the ceremony, and to celebrate all of the wonderful books and authors nominated for the awards this year, Literary Hub will be sharing short interviews with each of the finalists in all five categories: Young People’s Literature, Translated Literature, Poetry, Nonfiction, and Fiction.

Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, translated by Jennifer Croft (Riverhead), a woven, refracted travel narrative that was also the winner of the 2018 Man Booker International Prize, is a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award in Translated Literature. Literary Hub asked Tokarczuk and Croft a few questions about their work, their lives, and the books they love.

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Olga Tokarczuk

What’s the best book you read this year?

Michael Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things. It’s an astonishing and philosophical novel you can read on many levels. I like how cleverly it plays with sci-fi and genre and pushes the boundaries. I cannot stop thinking about it.

What time of day do you write (and why)?

Always in the morning, the earlier the better. In the morning my brain seems to be fresh and creative. Sometimes I even write notes in bed half-sleeping and these are the best ideas.

How do you tackle writer’s block?

Perhaps it looks strange to many but I don’t have any writer’s block. My problem is of a different nature—I always have too many ideas to manage.

Which book(s) do you return to again and again?

To Bruno Schulz, because of the language. To Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, because of the joy of storytelling. To Waclaw Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, because of genial structure. To Philip K. Dick, because his books make my mind fruitful and creative.

Which non-literary piece of culture—film, tv show, painting, song—could you not imagine your life without?

It’s for sure film. Films give me pleasure, emotions and the possibility to sneak out from my own reality for a while. I also use to learn a lot from films especially in a terms of structure and process of narrative. Film seems to me to be much more advanced in ways of storytelling than the novel.

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Jennifer Croft:

What’s the best book you read this year?

This Little Art, by Kate Briggs (Fitzcarraldo Editions).

What do you always want to talk about in interviews but never get to?

My cats. They’re really cute, but for some reason no one ever cares.

What time of day do you write (and why)?

I always do my best work in the mornings, before the world takes its toll on me. And before I crash after drinking all that caffeine!

How do you tackle writer’s block?

Translation is my antidote to writer’s block. It’s a wonderful way to continue to write and learn new strategies, things, styles while allowing ideas for future original writing to take shape in the back of my mind.

You’re in the middle of a mammoth translation project of a later book by Olga Tokarczuk—what does it share with this book, and does her writing change as it goes back into time?

I’m at the glorious Cullman Center at the New York Public Library this year, translating Olga’s latest novel The Books of Jacob, which is about real historical figure Jacob Frank, the leader of a heretical Jewish sect in Central Europe (mostly) in the eighteenth century (and beyond). It’s a brilliant book, and I love it, but I would of course say the same about Flights. They do share some common concerns—the need to be in motion, for instance, as well as an insistence upon interrogating how we know what we know—but The Books of Jacob is at once more focused and more sweeping. I can’t wait for people to read it in English!