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Jennifer Croft

Biography

Jennifer Croft

Jennifer Croft won the Man Booker International Prize for her translation from Polish of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s FLIGHTS. She is the author of HOMESICK, a Saroyan Prize winner; THE EXTINCTION OF IRENA REY, her debut novel; and numerous pieces in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Paris Review Daily and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literary Studies from Northwestern University and an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa.

Jennifer Croft

Books by Jennifer Croft

The Extinction of Irena Rey
by Jennifer Croft - Fiction, Literary Fiction, Literary Mystery, Mystery

Eight translators arrive at a house in a primeval Polish forest on the border of Belarus. It belongs to the world-renowned author Irena Rey, and they are there to translate her magnum opus, Gray Eminence. But within days of their arrival, Irena disappears without a trace. The translators, who hail from eight different countries but share the same reverence for their beloved author, begin to investigate where she may have gone while proceeding with work on her masterpiece. They explore this ancient wooded refuge with its intoxicating slime molds and lichens and study her exotic belongings and layered texts for clues. But doing so reveals secrets --- and deceptions --- of Irena Rey's that they are utterly unprepared for.

The Books of Jacob
written by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft - Fiction, Historical Fiction

In the mid-18th century, as new ideas --- and a new unrest --- begin to sweep the Continent, a young Jew of mysterious origins arrives in a village in Poland. Visited by what seem to be ecstatic experiences, Jacob Frank casts a charismatic spell that attracts an increasingly fervent following. In the decade to come, Frank will traverse the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires with throngs of disciples in his thrall as he reinvents himself again and again, converts to Islam and then Catholicism, is pilloried as a heretic and revered as the Messiah, and wreaks havoc on the conventional order, Jewish and Christian alike, with scandalous rumors of his sect’s secret rituals and the spread of his increasingly iconoclastic beliefs.

Flights
written by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft - Fiction

Olga Tokarczuk’s novel interweaves reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion and migration. Chopin's heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. FLIGHTS explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time. Where are you from? Where are you coming in from? Where are you going?