Jennifer Croft

It's important for me to be able to hear the tone of a sentence, picture the facial expression and gestures that would accompany it, in order to find a fitting rendition in English.

[15][16][17] Publishers Weekly wrote that Croft, "serves up a wickedly funny mystery involving an internationally famous author and her translators".

[19] Croft is the recipient of Guggenheim, Cullman, Fulbright, PEN, MacDowell, Fondation Jan Michalski, Yaddo, and National Endowment for the Arts grants and fellowships, as well as the inaugural Michael Henry Heim Prize for Translation and a Tin House Workshop Scholarship for Homesick.

On being asked what drew her to the writer's work, Jennifer Croft has said,I stumbled upon Olga Tokarczuk’s first short-story collection, Playing Many Drums, in 2003 as I prepared for a Fulbright at the University of Warsaw, where I would continue to study literary translation.

Right away I loved her soothing, nuanced style, but I think the thing that appealed to me most was her psychological acuity, her ability to distill the essence of a person—I say "person" since her characters are so alive it’s hard for me to call them characters—and set in motion relationships that might charm and shock us at the same time, all while feeling both familiar and fresh.On being asked specifically about the novel Flights, Croft said,Tokarczuk calls Flights a "constellation" novel, which partly means she brings lots of different ideas and stories and voices into relationship with one another via the lines the reader draws between them.

One minute I was worrying about the woman who flies back to Poland from New Zealand to kill a dying childhood friend; the next I was amused by the foibles of the Internet; the next I was rethinking my own approach to travel, or to my body.

[20]In March 2022, Croft's translation of Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob was longlisted for the 2022 Man Booker International Prize.

Olga Tokarczuk and Jennifer Croft with Lisa Appignanesi OBE, chair of the judges for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize