The 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk (born 1962) "for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.

[2] Tokarczuk is the fifth Nobel laureate in Literature from Poland writing in Polish, after the poet Wisława Szymborska in 1996, and Czesław Miłosz in 1980.

Among her other significant novels include Prawiek i inne czasy ("Primeval and Other Times", 1997), Bieguni ("Flights", 2007), and Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych ("Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead", 2009).

"[4]During Smith's phone call, she spoke of the importance of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature as a symbol of hope for those worried about the "crisis in democracy" she sees facing central Europe.

"The Swedish Academy has made many mistakes in recent years", wrote Claire Armitstead, "but in the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, it has found not only a fine winner but a culturally important one.

[8] Tokarczuk outraged rightwing patriots by saying that, contrary to its self-image as a plucky survivor of oppression, Poland itself had committed "horrendous acts" of colonisation at times in its history.

At the prize presentation on 10 December 2019, Per Wästberg, member of the Swedish Academy, said of Tokarczuk: "Her fusion of intensive embodiment and ephemeral unreality, intimate observation and mythological obsession, make her one of our time's most original prose writers, with new ways of viewing reality.

Tokarczuk immediately clarifies, causing her audience to laugh, that her winning was nothing similar to the film by saying: "No, no, please don't worry – I can solemnly declare that I wrote all my own books myself.

"[14][15] She concluded her speech by stating: "Today, it is exactly one hundred ten years since the first woman won the Nobel Prize in Literature – Selma Lagerlöf.

I bow low to her across time, and to all the other women, all the female creators who boldly exceeded the limiting roles society imposed on them, and had the courage to tell their story to the world loud and clear.