Cover of Olga Tokarczuk's 2012 novel
According to the annual Ladbrokes list, Polish Poets Tadeusz Różewicz and Adam Zagajewski, along with novelist Olga Tokarczuk are among the candidates for the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature
Tadeusz Różewicz, 91 years of age this year, is one of Poland's foremost poets and playwrights. Różewicz wilfully undermines the poet's status; he seeks the tone of the common man, from whichever country, the folklorish anon. His working motto is: "The poem / is finished / now to break it". Różewicz has provided his own answer by creating a new type of restrained verse that is known as the fourth versification system in literary Polish. Tadeusz Różewicz was awarded the NIKE prize, Poland's highest literary honour, in 2000 and the European Prize for Literature in 2007. His 2008 collection of poems was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Edward Hirsch called him "an anti-poet relentlessly, even ruthlessly determined to tell the truth, however painful it may be". In 20011 W.W. Norton and Company published the collection Sobbing Superpower: Selected Poems of Tadeusz Rozewicz.
Born in 1945 in Lviv, Adam Zagajewski was a political dissident in the 1970s, associated with the independent literature movement. Soon after signing the "letter of 59" in 1975, his works were banned. In 1982 at the height of the martial law period, he moved to Paris. His first poetry books, Komunikat / Communiqué and Sklepy mięsne / Meat Shops fulfilled his generation's manifesto for speaking the truth about the public reality and exposing the falsity of the official language. Apart from poems which were a reaction to the imposition of the martial law, his collection List. Oda do wielości / Letter. Ode to Multiplicity included those themes and their poetic representations which were to become distinct features of Zagajewski's works. Since then, his poetry has been contemplative and filled with questions His poem Try to praise the mutilated world, published in The New Yorker magazine's memorial edition for 11 September 2001, solidified his reputation as a poet of the world in the United States, where he taught at the University of Houston. In 2002 Zagajewski returned to Poland and currently lives in Kraków with his wife Maja Wodecka, an actress and translator. In 2008 he received the Czesław Miłosz Prize, awarded to those who have made outstanding contributions to the development of the Polish-US cultural dialogue and contacts. He has been nominated for the Nobel Prize several times before, but has not yet won the prize.
Olga Tokarczuk is the youngest of the three Polish Nobel hopefuls. Born in 1962, she is one of the most critically acclaimed and most translated Polish writers, with House of Day, House of Night and Primeval and Other Tales being her greatest commercial and critical successes. House of Day, House of Night won the Brücke-Berlin prize for literature in translation and shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The book is an amalgam of plots, observations, private notes and the like. It is Tokarczuk's most personal and "local" book, drawing inspiration from the area where she lives (a village in Sudety on the Polish and Czech border), such as in the stunning story of the medieval Saint Kummernis, a woman whom God saved from an unwanted marriage by giving her a male face.
She has been nominated for the Nike Literary Award several times, receiving the readers' choice of the Nike prize four times. In 2012 she published Moment niedźwiedzia /The Bear’s Moment. Critic Joanna Bator wrote of the dialogue that the author takes up with J.M. Coetzee and Elizabeth Costello, "undermining the boundary between nature and culture, between woman and man, as well as the truth of life and the truth of a story".
Prior laureates of the Nobel Prize for Literature include Poland's Henryk Sienkiewicz (1905), Władysław Reymont (1924), Czesław Miłosz (1980) and Wisława Szymborska (1996).
How do Poland's writers figure among this year's Nobel candidates? The Ladbrokes list, which hedges bets on the likely winners, has singled out Asian writers as the favourites this year, namely Japanese writer Haruki Murakami and Chinese author Mo Yan. The Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded by the Swedish Academy, Stockholm, Sweden. The Academy announces its verdict in October.
Editor: Agnieszka Le Nart
Source: thenews.pl, The Guardian, Culture.pl