You’ve got to hand it to the Nobel Prize in Literature committee: its citations are masterpieces of brevity and precision. Entire lifetimes of tireless, painstaking effort, thousands of pages written over decades, are summed up in a statement of around 20 words.
The work of Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, the 2018 Nobel Laureate, is a case in point. The hallowed Swedish academy awarded her the prize “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life”. That’s 18 words, if you’re counting.
