Olga Tokarczuk and Karol Lesman receive European Literature Prize 2024

Accepting the award, Olga Tokarczuk said: ‘The book that you have rewarded with this wonderful prize is a voice in this continual dialogue that is the beating heart of culture in general. But we cannot think of culture as nothing but a store, because above all it is a conversation, a series of questions and answers, an interpretation, and also an act of defiance against the obstinacy of the authorities.’

Translator Karol Lesman said: 'In coming up with a motto for myself, I have had little difficulty and certainly no Cartesian doubt: Verto ergo sum - ‘I translate therefore I exist’, and I owe this raison d’être largely to my, and also Olga’s, favourite work of Polish literature, The Doll by Bolesław Prus. When I first read this novel some fifty years ago, I knew what I would become: a translator, because I wanted every Dutch-speaking reader to be able to read this brilliant nineteenth-century novel in his or her mother tongue.'

Managing director Romkje de Bildt said: 'Cultures are not and should not be closed or inward-looking, and they are never ‘complete’. They are open systems, fed by a wide variety of often conflicting currents. The history of European literature shows that the borders between languages are largely porous: Dutch novelist Willem Frederik Hermans owes a great debt to Kafka, who in turn was heavily influenced by Flaubert and there wouldn’t have been the novel Empusion without a Polish translation of Der Zauberberg.'

The jury about Tokarczuk: 'Tokarczuk astutely shows and unmasks the ideas that have permanently influenced and perpetuated the self-image of the European intellectual, of Europe. Empusion is not only in dialogue with Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, but with a whole line of thinkers who saw patriarchy as a self-evident condition for universality.'

The jury about Lesman: 'With his translation of Empusion, Lesman demonstrates that he can fulfil this task like no other. Tokarczuk’s meandering sentences evoke a slightly hallucinatory atmosphere, reminiscent of an early twentieth-century sanatorium, which, in their formality, are often quite comical as they navigate the mysterious space between knowing and not-knowing. In Lesman’s Dutch translation, these meandering sentences read so rhythmically and naturally that at no point do you feel you are reading a translated novel.'