Poland's Olga Tokarczuk: perpetual motion literature

Olga Tokarczuk, considered the most talented Polish novelist of her generation, has a string of bestsellers to her name and a style that blends the real with the mystical.

A vegetarian and environmentalist with long, dark dreadlocks, the 57-year-old writer is also a political activist who does not shy away from criticising Poland's right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) government.

She received death threats in 2015 after telling state media that an open and tolerant Poland was a myth. Her publishers assigned her a security detail for a week.

Her books portray a polychromatic world perpetually in motion, with characters' traits intermingled and language that is both precise and poetic.

"I don't have a clear biography of my own that I could recount in an interesting way. I'm made up of the characters that I pulled out of my head, that I invented," Tokarczuk said in an interview with The Polish Book Institute.

"I'm made up of all of them. I have a huge, multi-frame biography."