Olga Tokarczuk On Facing the Blank Page

“I have never experienced a creative emptiness,” says Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature. She here shares her fearless approach to beginning a book, always con-fident that the voice of the novel will eventually present itself. “Today, the empty page means waiting for a voice in my head that will tell me the whole story.” While Tokarczuk patiently waits, she makes drafts of the outline of the story and its characters, and prepares her reading matter – “writing