Olga Tokarczuk

Tokarczuk trained and worked as a clinical psychologist, including time counseling addicts, before writing became her full-time work, a background that shows in her patient attention to consciousness fragmenting under pressure. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, her eco-fable narrated by an eccentric older woman convinced the local hunters are being killed by their prey, was adapted into the film Spoor by Agnieszka Holland.

Her outspoken essays on Poland's history of violence toward Jews and other minorities brought a wave of hate mail and death threats severe enough that she has traveled with bodyguards. The Swedish Academy's own 2018 scandal delayed her Nobel Prize by a year, awarded alongside 2019's; she became the first Polish woman to win the literature prize, honored for a body of work (including the mammoth historical novel The Books of Jacob) built from fragments that refuse to add up to any single tidy story.