Fitzcarraldo Editions Makes Challenging Literature Chic

Various British novelists, including John Lanchester and Rachel Cusk, had combatted this stereotype by including sensitive portrayals of Polish builders in books about life in the U.K. Testard, for his part, decided to add to the diversity of Polish voices in Britain by making Tokarczuk’s work available in translation. Tokarczuk, who was born in 1962, and whose first novel, “The Journey of the Book-People,” was published in her native country in 1993, had become one of Poland’s most heralded intellectuals, with a catalogue of genre-defying novels that draw on history and myth. Although Tokarczuk’s work had been translated into French, German, and several other European languages, none of her novels were in print in English in the U.K.