Flights has been selected the winner of this year’s Man Booker International Prize. Polish author Olga Tokarczuk and English-language translator Jennifer Croft will share equally in the £50,000 prize.

Flights is a novel of linked fragments. This philosophical and highly imaginative work explores subjects such as anatomy and psychology through narratives and reflections on travel and the body.

Lisa Appignanesi, chair of the 2018 Man Booker International Prize judging panel, says: ‘Tokarczuk is a writer of wonderful wit, imagination and literary panache. In Flights, brilliantly translated by Jennifer Croft, by a series of startling juxtapositions she flies us through a galaxy of departures and arrivals, stories and digressions, all the while exploring matters close to the contemporary and human predicament – where only plastic escapes mortality.’

Tokarczuk is a multiple award winner and bestseller in Poland, and her work is rapidly gaining recognition in the English-speaking world. She trained as a psychologist at the University of Warsaw, and her interest in Jung continues to influence her work. She is the author of eight novels and two short-story collections, and alongside her writing, she co-hosts a boutique literary festival near her home in Lower Silesia in southern Poland.

Croft translates from Polish, Spanish and Ukrainian, having studied for an MFA in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa. She has lived in Argentina and Poland, and now resides in Los Angeles. She is a founding editor of the Buenos Aires Review.

The Man Booker International Prize is awarded every year for a single book, which is translated into English and published in the UK. Read more about the Prize here.