Bieńczyk, who is a four time finalist of the Nike award, sketches out 23 portraits of people who hold signifance for him: from the legendary Vinnetou, through Polish football coaches Leo Benhaker and Kazimierz Górski, through the figures of Raymond Chandler, Baudelaire and Jan Karski. The author comments: This is a book about a different world order. I don’t write about people who fight, but instead I choose heroes who decided to step off the front line, and this is a little against the spirit of the times. I am hypnotised by the face of Jan Karski, an emisary who was the first one to deliver the news of the Holocaust to the world. I also write about the last match played out by Andre Agassi. I don’t remember him hitting the ball, I just remember his face. But I decided not to describe the face that is most important to me. The face is something that intrigues me. This book is also about the dream of stepping aside a little bit, like a child – of finding oneself under the dinner table, with the grown ups having a feast above.
With the figures of other people Bieńczyk assembles his self-portait. The jury’s verdits reads:
For him, the world is an impulse, and one of the most fruitful kind, of dressing it up in any text that may be. Literature as the great dictionary of democracy makes all of its elements equal, whether it is the smell of a mint leaf, striking a ball in a volley, a falcon and falconer, a morning coffee and the reading of Proust, the love of three oranges and a threepenny opera. (…) In an era of superficiality, rushed action and carelessness, the phrase conjured up by Marek Bieńczyk is like a Schubert quartet on a late july afternoon, indulged on the terrace of a café by Campo de’ Fiori. With a glass of cold chianti essentially at hand.
The President of the jury, Tadeusz Nyczek admits that the battle of the finalists lasted up until the very end. Among the last seven competing pieces, there were two biographies and two reporter’s pieces, a collection of poetry and a novel. It is the first time that the winning genre of the prize is that of a literary essay. This came as a surprising decision on the part of the jury. Nyczek goes on to explain:
Książka twarzy is also an autobiography and a form of self-narration. Mixed forms are growing more and more popular with readers, and the essay seems to be the most flexible and potent form. It contains journalism, prose and poetic elements, and it is also a great literary genre, which has a great tradition in Poland. It is unjust that the essay was omitted in the previous Nike finals. This decision makes up for the backlog.
Marek Bieńczyk thus comments on his:
The book is difficult, it is neither prose, which is easiest to recognise, nor poetry, which is always so precious. I cultivate a genre which is not so strongly present in the public space, and the texts demand that the reader is somewhat familiar with the key literary phenomena, even if I had written some of them for various journals, with a wider audience in mind. I would like to write for people who want to cry or laugh, to rejoice or to toss the book in the corner – I like to first meet the reader on the emotional level, and only then to encounter him on the intellectual plane. If somebody likes to be moved, or to dream of what lies beyond the rushed reality of the city and spend time with the book’s heroes somewhere in the marginal, inaccessible and hidden places – this book is just for him.
The official award ceremony took place for the 16th time, and it was hosted by Warsaw Univesity Library. Nike is an annual prestigious literary prize
The winner is selected in three phases of selections and is presented with an award of 100 thousand zlotych and the Nike statue. The award is founded by the Agora Foundation and the author of the statue is professor Gustaw Zemła.
Other titles listed among the seven finalists included "Włoskie szpilki"(Italian High-heels) from the four-time Nike finalist Magdalena Tulli, "Dom Żółwia. Zanzibar", (The home of the Turtle. Zanzibar), a reportage by Małgorzata Szejnert, as well as two biographies - "Miłosz. Biografia" from Andrzej Franaszek and the portrait of the Polish painter and artist Jerzegy Nowosielski "Nietoperz w świątyni" (A Bat in the Shrine), written by Krystyna Czerń, a reportage-book from Filip Springer "Miedzianka. Historia znikania" (Miedzianka. The History of Disappearing) and the collection of poetry entitled "Imię i znamię"(Name and Nevus), by Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki, who is a laureate of the 2009 Nike award.
The winning book was selected by a nine-person jury which included translator and essayist Jan Gondowicz, art historian professor Maria Poprzęcka, the chair of the Polish PEN CLUB Adam Pomorski, literary scholar and writer Inga Iwasiów, literary critic Przemysław Czapiński, writer and journalist Iwona Smolka, Marek Beylin, a journalist of the Gazeta Wyborcza daily, and the literary scholar Ryszard Koziołek. Presiding over the jury’s debate was the literary critic Tadeusz Nyczek.
Previous recipients of the Nike award include: Wiesław Myśliwski (1997 and 2007), Czesław Miłosz (1998), Stanisław Barańczak (1999), Tadeusz Różewicz (2000), Jerzy Pilch (2001), Joanna Olczak-Ronikier (2002), Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz (2003), Wojciech Kuczok (2004), Andrzej Stasiuk (2005), Dorota Masłowska (2006), Olga Tokarczuk (2008), Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki (2009), Tadeusz Słobodzianek (2010) and Marian Pilot (2011).