Reading List

Authors Like Olga Tokarczuk

Olga Tokarczuk studied clinical psychology at the University of Warsaw and worked as a psychotherapist before she wrote novels. Primeval and Other Times (1996) tells the twentieth century through one invented Polish village. Flights (2007), a book of fragments about travellers, bodies and anatomical specimens, won the Man Booker International Prize in 2018 in Jennifer Croft's translation. After The Books of Jacob (2014), about the eighteenth-century messiah Jacob Frank, nationalists in Nowa Ruda demanded that the town revoke her honorary citizenship. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2018, announced a year late, in 2019. On 14 October 2026 she launched Świata jest za dużo, a novel of almost 700 pages set in Lower Silesia in 1946, at Wrocław's Centennial Hall. The ten writers below share her habits: books built from fragments, folklore and archives, and a voice for animals, the dead and the displaced.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Constellation novels · Central European history · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

The closest matches to Olga Tokarczuk are W. G. Sebald, whose The Rings of Saturn (1995) wanders between travel, history and the dead like Flights, Bruno Schulz, the Polish fabulist of The Street of Crocodiles (1934), and Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose Satan in Goray (1935) follows a village swept up by the false messiah whose successor Jacob Frank claimed to be. Further down are the poet who gave her a title, and a novelist who stages the same animal-rights argument and leaves it open.

10 authors like Olga Tokarczuk

01
The poet behind the title

William Blake

English · The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1790–93), Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794)

Blake was born in London in 1757 and worked as an engraver, printing and colouring his own illuminated books. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell contains the ‘Proverbs of Hell’, among them ‘Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead’. He died in 1827, largely unrecognised.

Tokarczuk took the title of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead from that proverb, and her narrator, Janina, translates Blake with a younger friend. Read him for the visionary, anti-authority streak in the novel.

— Lisanne

Every book by William Blake →

02
The town turned into myth

Bruno Schulz

Polish · The Street of Crocodiles (1934), Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1937)

Schulz was born in 1892 in Drohobych, then in Austria-Hungary and now in Ukraine, and taught art at a school there. His stories turn his father's cloth shop and the streets of the town into myth and dream. In 1942 he was shot dead in the street by a Gestapo officer.

Schulz and Tokarczuk both make a small Central European place into a whole cosmos, as she does in Primeval and Other Times. Her new novel opened the 2026 Bruno Schulz Festival, and some of its characters come from Drohobych.

— Lisanne
03
False messiahs in Polish villages

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Polish-born American · Satan in Goray (1935), The Magician of Lublin (1960)

Singer was born near Warsaw in 1903, emigrated to the United States in 1935 and wrote in Yiddish. Satan in Goray is set in a Polish town in 1666, in the aftermath of the Chmielnicki massacres, as its Jews fall under the spell of the messiah Sabbatai Zevi. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978 and died in 1991.

The Books of Jacob follows the next chapter of the same story, as Jacob Frank claims to be Sabbatai Zevi's successor. Singer suits readers who want that world in a shorter, darker book.

— Lisanne
04
Fiction disguised as scholarship

Jorge Luis Borges

Argentine · Ficciones (1944), The Aleph (1949)

Borges was born in Buenos Aires in 1899 and became director of Argentina's National Library in 1955, by which time he was almost blind. His short stories take the form of encyclopaedia entries, book reviews and maps of imaginary places. He died in Geneva in 1986.

Both write fiction as if it were scholarship, with invented documents, lists and digressions. Borges suits readers who love the essayistic pieces in Flights more than its stories.

— Lisanne

Every book by Jorge Luis Borges →

05
The book as a set of fragments

Italo Calvino

Italian · Invisible Cities (1972), If on a winter's night a traveller (1979)

Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923 and grew up in San Remo; he fought with the Italian partisans in the Second World War. He collected and retold Italian Folktales (1956), and Invisible Cities is built from Marco Polo's short descriptions of imaginary cities for Kublai Khan. He died in 1985.

Calvino builds books from short linked pieces, as Tokarczuk does in Flights, and draws on folk tales as she does. Invisible Cities is the companion read for her travel fragments.

— Lisanne

Every book by Italo Calvino →

06
The walker among the dead

W. G. Sebald

German · The Emigrants (1992), The Rings of Saturn (1995), Austerlitz (2001)

Sebald was born in Wertach, Bavaria, in 1944 and taught at the University of East Anglia from 1970. His books mix walking, history and unlabelled photographs. Carole Angier's 2021 biography raised questions about how he used real people's lives, notably that of Susi Bechhöfer, whose story resembles Austerlitz. He died in a car crash near Norwich in 2001.

Sebald and Tokarczuk both write books that drift between essay, travel and history, and both are drawn to museums, anatomy and the dead. Readers of Flights should start with The Rings of Saturn.

— Lisanne

Every book by W. G. Sebald →

07
The animal argument, left open

J. M. Coetzee

South African-born Australian · Disgrace (1999), The Lives of Animals (1999), Elizabeth Costello (2003)

Coetzee was born in Cape Town in 1940. He won the Booker Prize twice, for Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and Disgrace, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. In Elizabeth Costello an ageing novelist lectures that the treatment of animals is comparable to the Holocaust, and the book gives her listeners room to object. He moved to Adelaide in 2002.

Tokarczuk's Janina avenges animals; Coetzee's Costello argues for them and is not sure she is right. Read him after Drive Your Plow to see the same conviction tested rather than acted on.

— Lisanne
08
A chorus of voices

Svetlana Alexievich

Belarusian · The Unwomanly Face of War (1985), Voices from Chernobyl (1997), Secondhand Time (2013)

Alexievich was born in 1948 in western Ukraine and grew up in Belarus. Her books are built from hundreds of interviews, edited into a chorus of voices about war, Chernobyl and the end of the Soviet Union. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015 and left Belarus in 2020 after joining the opposition's Coordination Council.

Alexievich tells Eastern Europe's twentieth century through many voices rather than one hero, as Tokarczuk does in her constellation novels. She suits readers drawn to the war and displacement at the heart of Tokarczuk's new book.

— Lisanne

Every book by Svetlana Alexievich →

09
A century in one place

Jenny Erpenbeck

German · Visitation (2008), Go, Went, Gone (2015), Kairos (2021)

Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin in 1967 and worked as an opera director before she wrote fiction. Visitation follows a house by a Brandenburg lake and the people who live in it across the twentieth century. Kairos, translated by Michael Hofmann, won the International Booker Prize in 2024.

Visitation and Primeval and Other Times do the same thing: tell a violent century through one small patch of Central European ground. Erpenbeck suits readers who want that in fewer pages.

— Lisanne
10
The body that refuses

Han Kang

South Korean · The Vegetarian (2007), Human Acts (2014)

Han was born in Gwangju in 1970. The Vegetarian, about a woman who stops eating meat and then almost stops eating, won the Man Booker International Prize in 2016 in Deborah Smith's translation. Human Acts is about the 1980 Gwangju Uprising. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024.

Both write women whose refusal of meat and of ordinary life is treated as madness by the people around them. Han's novels are shorter and more inward, which makes her the next step for readers who loved Janina.

— Lisanne

Every book by Han Kang →

Where to start if you loved Olga Tokarczuk

If you liked Flights, read W. G. Sebald.

The Rings of Saturn: a walk through Suffolk that becomes a history of loss.

If you liked Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, read William Blake.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: the proverbs her title and her narrator come from.

If you liked The Books of Jacob, read Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Satan in Goray: the false messiah before Jacob Frank.

If you want a century in one place, read Jenny Erpenbeck.

Visitation: one lakeside house through the twentieth century.

If you have read only one Tokarczuk, try her Primeval and Other Times (1996).

Her early novel about a mythical Polish village from 1914 onwards, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Olga Tokarczuk

Who writes like Olga Tokarczuk?

W. G. Sebald, Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges share her fragmentary, essayistic way of building a book. Bruno Schulz and Isaac Bashevis Singer write about the Polish-Jewish world of The Books of Jacob.

Does Olga Tokarczuk have a new book?

Yes. Świata jest za dużo (roughly ‘There Is Too Much World’), a novel of almost 700 pages set in Lower Silesia after the Second World War, was published in Polish by Wydawnictwo Literackie in October 2026. Her most recent book in English is The Empusium (2024), translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

What should I read after Flights?

W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn (1995) and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities (1972) are built the same way, from linked fragments. By Tokarczuk herself, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009) is a shorter book with a plot: a murder mystery.

Which Olga Tokarczuk book should I read first?

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009; English 2019) is the easiest way in. Flights (2007; English 2018) won the Man Booker International Prize, and The Books of Jacob (2014; English 2021) is her longest novel in English.

Is Olga Tokarczuk like W. G. Sebald?

Both write books that wander between essay, travel and history, and both are drawn to anatomy, museums and the dead. Sebald's books are held together by one melancholy narrator; Tokarczuk's novels more often move between many characters.

When did Olga Tokarczuk win the Nobel Prize?

She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2018. It was announced in October 2019, a year late, after a scandal inside the Swedish Academy postponed the 2018 prize.

Sources

List last reviewed 31 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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