Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, 62, was awarded the Nobel prize in literature in 2018, the same year that she won the International Booker for her fragmentary novel Flights, cited by the judges for its “wit and gleeful mischief”. Annie Proulx has compared her to WG Sebald; for the London Review of Books, her 900-page historical epic The Books of Jacob (translated by Jennifer Croft in 2021) stands alongside “the great postmodern meganovels by Pynchon or Perec, Bolaño or García Márquez”. Tokarczuk, via the interpreter Marta Dziurosz, was speaking from Wrocław, Poland about her new novel, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story, set amid creepy goings-on at a sanatorium before the first world war.
Where did this book begin?
The idea occurred to me many years ago but I was deeply engaged in The Books of Jacob and this funny sort of pastiche novel had to wait, even though I often work on different books at the same time and was also writing Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead [2009] on top of everything else. What actually helped The Empusium was the pandemic: after all my travels because of the Nobel, I had the chance to return home to my nest in the forests of Lower Silesia.
