Olga Tokarczuk

Flights

Flights — originally published in Polish as Bieguni in 2007 and translated into English by Jennifer Croft — is a fragmentary novel by Olga Tokarczuk that won the Man Booker International Prize in 2018, the first time a Polish author received the award. Structured as 116 short pieces narrated by a nameless female traveller, the book weaves fiction, memoir, philosophical digression, and cultural anthropology into a sustained meditation on travel, mobility, and the human body. Major outlets including Kirkus Reviews praised it as both a literary achievement and an ideal entry point into Tokarczuk's work, though critics have also noted that its recursive, theme-heavy architecture can tip into abstraction.

Reviewed Jun 5, 2026