Fiction-Writers and Public Lawyers: Explaining and Solving Global Problems

Olga Tokarczuk is the recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature. She was born in Poland in 1962 and studied psychology at the University of Warsaw. She is the most translated Polish author and the author of eight novels and three short story collections. She has twice won the most prestigious Polish literary prize, the Nike Award, for Flights (Bieguni) in 2008 and for The Books of Jacob (Księgi Jakubowe) in 2015.
Olga Tokarczuk lives in Wrocław in Poland where she is setting up a foundation which will offer scholarships for writers and translators and educational programmes on literature.

Attorney-at-law and social activist. Co-founder of the Justice Defense Committee and Free Courts that monitor and archive political pressure on judges and lawyers, giving them legal aid. Sylwia represents national and sexual minorities, refugees, victims of violence and police brutality before courts. She also represents Supreme Court judges before EU Court of Justice and European Court of Human Rights in key proceedings on the independence of courts and judges.

Adam Bodnar - professor of law and dean of the Law Faculty of the SWPS University in Warsaw, visiting professor at the University of Cologne, senior fellow in the Democracy Institute of the Central European University in Budapest; member of advisory boards of International IDEA, Liberties and World Organization Against Torture; former Ombudsman of the Republic of Poland (September 2015 - July 2021).