08.10.2020 – DAY SIXTH of the Festival opened with a documentary exhibition – The Treasures of Krakow of the International Cultural Center in Krakow, presented by the new director of the Polish Cultural Institute in Sofia, Anna Opalińska, together with Ms. Svetla Karanesheva (Program Department, translator).The program continued with readings from three of Olga Tokarczuk’s books.

In 2019, Tokarczuk received the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2018 for “her narrative imagination, which with encyclopedic passion reveals the crossing of borders as a form of life.” The novel Flights was published in 2007 in Poland. In 2008 the author received the Nike Literary Prize, and ten years later – The Man Booker International Prize 2018. This is a book about the essence of travel, its psychology, and for human anatomy. The title refers to the Russian Old Believer sect of runners, who believe that contact with evil can be avoided by constant movement in space. If you stay put, you are vulnerable; if you move, your soul can be saved.

Drive your plow through the bones of the dead was published in Poland in 2009 and was nominated for the Nike Literary Prize in 2010. It is the basis of Agnieszka Holland’s film Pokot. When the corpse of a man is found in a remote mountain village, surrounded by wild animal tracks, there seems to be no doubt that he has fallen victim to wildlife attacks… and yes, the discovery of the murders is certainly just a glide on the surface of the plot. We are invited to go as deep into this daring and darkly beautiful mystery as we can – emotionally and reader-wise.

The Lost Soul was published in Poland in 2009.

There was once a man who was so busy and immersed in his work that his soul was left somewhere behind him. He continued to live – sleep, eat, work, drive his car and even play tennis. Sometimes, however, he caught himself noticing that the world around him had become somehow two-dimensional, flat, squared like a math notebook. A journey deep into our own lost selves, a book about loneliness, the search for salvation and of childhood times never to return.