WARSAW, Poland (AP) - Poland’s Nobel Prize winning writer Olga Tokarczuk said Monday she is starting a foundation to promote literature as well as human rights and environment awareness.
Tokarczuk is an outspoken critic of Poland’s right-wing government and of its policy of supporting mainly those artists and historians who follow its conservative outlook and stress on national values.
She said she was offering 350,000 zlotys ($89,000; 81,000 euros) for the Olga Tokarczuk Foundation that will offer undiscriminating support to Polish and foreign writers and authors. It will also promote minority and women’s rights.
The 57-year-old Tokarczuk said she was glad she still feels young and can use her distinction to the purpose of doing “something good for the world.”
She has asked filmmaker Agnieszka Holland, who has filmed her animal rights novel “Drive your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead,” to be one of the foundation’s board members.
Tokarczuk will receive her award in a gala ceremony Dec.10 in Stockholm.
Poland’s government has been lukewarm about the distinction and the culture minister said he needs to try and finish reading her books.
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