Polish literature is the literary tradition of Poland. Most Polish literature has been written in the Polish language, though other languages used in Poland over the centuries have also contributed to Polish literary traditions, including Latin, Yiddish, Lithuanian, Russian, German and Esperanto. According to Czesław Miłosz, for centuries Polish literature focused more on drama and poetic self-expression than on fiction. The reasons were manifold but mostly rested on the historical circumstances of the nation. Polish writers typically have had a more profound range of choices to motivate them to write, including past cataclysms of extraordinary violence that swept Poland, but also, Poland's collective incongruities demanding an adequate reaction from the writing communities of any given period.
Hortulus Animae was the Latin title of a prayer book also available in German. It was very popular in the early sixteenth century, printed in many versions, also abroad in Lyons and Kraków.
The International Booker Prize is an international literary award hosted in the United Kingdom. The introduction of the International Prize to complement the Man Booker Prize was announced in June 2004. Sponsored by the Man Group, from 2005 until 2015 the award was given every two years to a living author of any nationality for a body of work published in English or generally available in English translation. It rewarded one author's "continued creativity, development and overall contribution to fiction on the world stage", and was a recognition of the writer's body of work rather than any one title.
The Nike Literary Award is one of the most prestigious awards for Polish literature. Established in 1997 and funded by Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's second largest daily paper, and the consulting company NICOM, it is conferred annually in October for the best book of a single living author writing in Polish published the previous year. It is open for nominees from all literary genres, including non-fiction essays and autobiographies. Each year, a nine-member jury selects the laureate in a three-stage process. Twenty official nominees are accepted in May, out of which seven finalists are declared in September. The final decision does not take place until the day of the award ceremony in October. The award consists of a statuette referring to the Greek goddess Nike, designed by the prominent Polish sculptor Kazimierz Gustaw Zemła, and a cash prize of currently PLN 100,000.
Olga Nawoja Tokarczuk is a Polish writer, activist, and public intellectual. She is one of the most critically acclaimed and successful authors of her generation in Poland; in 2019, she was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Polish female prose writer for "a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life". For her novel Flights, Tokarczuk has been awarded the 2018 Man Booker International Prize. Her works include Primeval and Other Times, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, and The Books of Jacob.
Jerzy Pilch was a Polish writer, columnist, and journalist. Critics have compared Pilch's style to Witold Gombrowicz, Milan Kundera, or Bohumil Hrabal.
Kristina Sabaliauskaitė is an art historian, doctor honoris causa of Vilnius Academy of Arts and one of the most prominent contemporary Lithuanian writers. Born in Vilnius, she has been based in London since 2002. She worked as a foreign correspondent in London and columnist for Lithuania's biggest daily newspaper until 2010.
Joanna Kulig is a Polish actress and singer. In 2018, she received the Best Actress Award at the 31st European Film Awards for her performance in Cold War. She is also a two-time Polish Film Award recipient for Best Supporting Actress (Elles) and Best Actress.
The Found in Translation Award is an annual award for the best translation of Polish literature into English. The award is given to the translator(s) who also receive a cash prize of PLN 16,000.
The Conrad Festival is an annual literary festival held in Krakow since 2009. It is organised by the Tygodnik Powszechny Foundation and the Krakow Festival Office and is supported by the Krakow Municipal Government and Poland's Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. It is the largest literary festival in Central Europe and was named after Polish-British novelist Joseph Conrad.
Jacek Baluch was a Polish scholar, writer, poet, translator and politician.
Iwona Chmielewska is a Polish author and illustrator, who publishes mainly for children but also for adults. Many of her works are published in South Korea where she has gained considerable popularity. She lives and works in Toruń in northern Poland where she teaches in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Nicolaus Copernicus University.
Flights is a 2007 fragmentary novel by the Polish author Olga Tokarczuk. It was originally published in Polish as Bieguni. The book was translated into English by Jennifer Croft. The original Polish title refers to runaways, a sect of Old Believers, who believe that being in constant motion is a trick to avoid evil.
Jennifer Croft is an American author, critic and translator who works from Polish, Ukrainian and Argentine Spanish. With the author Olga Tokarczuk, she was awarded the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her translation of Flights. In 2020, she was awarded the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for Homesick, which was originally written in Spanish in 2014 and was published in Argentina under its original title, Serpientes y escaleras.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a 2009 mystery novel by Olga Tokarczuk. Originally published in Polish by Wydawnictwo Literackie, it was later translated to English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones and published in 2018 by the British independent publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions. The book received a wider release in 2019 when it was published in the United States by Riverhead Books on 13 August 2019. A portion of the English translation was originally published in literary magazine Granta in 2017.
Primeval and Other Times is a fragmentary novel by Olga Tokarczuk, published by Wydawnictwo W.A.B. in 1996.
House of Day, House of Night is a novel by Olga Tokarczuk, published by Wydawnictwo Ruta in 1998.
The Books of Jacob is an epic historical novel by Olga Tokarczuk, published by Wydawnictwo Literackie in October 2014. It is Tokarczuk's ninth novel and is the product of extensive historical research, taking her seven years to write.
The 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk "for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life." The prize was announced by the Swedish Academy on 10 October 2019.
Antonia Lloyd-Jones is a British translator of Polish literature based in London. She is best known as the long-time translator of Olga Tokarczuk's works in English, including Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead which was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2019. The former co-chair of the Translators Association in the United Kingdom from 2015 to 2017, she is also a mentor for the Emerging Translator Mentorship Programme in the National Centre for Writing and has mentored several early-career translators from Polish into English.
