Olga Tokarczuk is the new Arne Næss Chair
The Center for Development and the Environment is proud to announce the 2022 Arne Næss Professor – the Nobel Prize winner in literature (2018) - Olga Tokarczuk.
Photo: Karpat&Zarewizc (ZAIKS)
Olga Tokarczuk is one of the most original nature thinkers and writers of our time. She is the author such masterpieces as Primeval and Other Times, Flights and the eco-thriller Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Her latest magnum opus, The Books of Job, has been declared by The New York Times as “A fantastic journey across seven borders, five languages and three major religions, not counting the minor sects.”
Nina Witoszek is director of the Arne Næss Programme at SUM.
From a Norwegian perspective, it is intriguing to see the affinities between Olga Tokarczuk’s fiction and Arne Næss’s ideas. Tokarczuk shows how human greed, failure to respect nature, and selfishness, have reduced our world – and ourselves - to a commodity. Her dream comes close to Næss’s vision of a republic of ‘caring creatives’ on planet Earth, says says Nina Witoszek, director of the Arne Næss Programme at SUM, UiO.
The Arne Næss Symposium
The Arne Næss Symposium featuring Olga Tokarczuk will take place on 25 August 2022, at Gamle Festsal, 18.00-20.00. Please hold the date.
For more information – which will follow shortly – contact the head of Arne Næss programme on Global Justice and the Environment, Nina Witoszek: [email protected]
The Arne Næss Programme
We draw on, and critically develop, the intellectual legacy after Norway’s greatest ecophilosopher, researcher and environmental activist.
