Croft, Jennifer

Jennifer Croft won the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her illustrated memoir Homesick and the 2018 Booker International Prize for her translation of Nobel Prize and International Booker Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. Croft is also the translator of Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob: A Novel (Riverhead Books), based on the life of Jacob Frank, an actual mid-18th-century historical figure around whom mystery and controversy swirl to this day. After arriving mysteriously in Poland, he would 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. Narrated by his contemporaries – some who revere him, others who revile him, the friend who betrays him, the lone woman who sees him for what he is – The Books of Jacob captures a world on the cusp of change, searching for certainty and longing for transcendence.