I’m Coming for Your Country! Polish Migrant Characters in Recent British Fiction

Henry-Lloyd-Hughes-czwartkowy-klub-copy.jpg, default, Still of Bogdan (Henry Lloyd-Hughes) & Elizabeth (Helen Mirren) in 'The Thursday Murder Club', photo: Giles Keyte / Netflix, *article contains plot spoilers*

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Polish migrants have been arriving in Britain for centuries, and British writers have been imagining them almost as long. But the post-2004 wave produced something new: literary portraits of Polish men navigating an England that can’t quite decide whether to welcome them or resent them.

In a 2025 article for Culture.pl, Mikołaj Gliński traced some of the major portrayals of Polish characters in English language literature from the 19th century to the present, ranging from Jane Porter’s Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) through George Eliot’s Will Ladislaw in Middlemarch (1871-2) to Ryszard Brankowski in Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting (2023). A motley mix of ‘noble insurgents, fugitive spies, dogged emigrants and irresistible car mechanics’, Gliński’s case studies demonstrated the diversity of Polish presence in British literature over the years.

Polish representation in British fiction remains a compelling topic – and sometimes quite a controversial one. This present article takes a narrower approach than Gliński’s by focusing on three recent texts – a novel, a play and a film adaptation – that each presents a Polish male character as a post-2004 economic migrant to Britain, navigating the various challenges, opportunities and prejudices of particular places and communities.

‘Where you from? Eastern Europe somewhere?’: ‘The Road Home’ (2007) by Rose Tremain

Rose Tremain’s fiction has long been recognised for the diversity of its settings and protagonists. A staunch defender of the ‘right’ of novelists to write from the perspectives of characters unlike themselves, Tremain undertook this task again in her 2007 book The Road Home, winner of the 2008 Orange Prize for Women’s Fiction, in which she presented the experiences of a migrant character, Lev, in early 21st century London.

Still, the inclusion of The Road Home in a piece about Polish migrant characters could be contentious, since Tremain never actually identifies Lev’s country of origin as Poland. Instead, the author mostly references the protagonist’s past in fictional towns and cities. With one exception: Lev, we learn, worked at ‘the Baryn sawmill’ before its closure, suggesting a Ukrainian background. Yet Lev’s status as a migrant from a ‘country [that’s] part of the European Union’, one who ‘has the right to work in England’, contradicts that idea as well.

Reflecting on her rationale for this vagueness, and on the research background of the novel, Tremain revealed:

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The most important piece of research I did for ‘The Road Home’ was to interview Polish field-workers in Suffolk. I learned a lot from them – about what they hoped to achieve in England, how they viewed the people here, and how much they worried about their parents at home... I also read many books about life in post-1989 Eastern Europe and returned to my own notes made on earlier visits to East Berlin and Russia. This research drove me to locate Lev’s backstory in an unnamed country, to create for myself an imaginative freedom.

Even though her homogenisation of different nations isn’t unproblematic, Tremain’s admission that conversations with Polish migrants to the UK were ‘the most important’ part of her research makes a consideration of the novel in this context viable. Also, what’s particularly valuable about The Road Home is that it makes Lev the protagonist, not a secondary character in the dramas of British heroes, as most other stories of migration to the UK tend to do.

Indeed, Tremain’s novel truly centralises Lev: it keeps the reader close to his feelings and perceptions throughout. The experiences of this 42-year-old widower feel both specific and representative of wider patterns. We first meet him, for instance, in the middle of a journey that’s been undertaken by many: travelling across Europe on a cramped coach to London where he hopes to find work in order to send money back to his mother and daughter.

The novel unfolds by juxtaposing Lev’s time in England – which encompasses homelessness and hunger, help and hindrance from others, and jobs as a leaflet-deliverer, kitchen assistant in a top restaurant, and asparagus-picker – with memories of his past. Tremain makes a point of showing how often Lev’s London life is affected by his interactions with other migrants, from the Arab kebab shop owner Ahmed who initially hires him, to the Dubliner Christy, who’s his first landlord and becomes a close friend. Another important figure is Lev’s compatriot, the translator Lydia, whom he meets on the coach journey, and who often helps him out in difficult moments.

Lev’s encounters with ‘native’ Brits include prejudice (he’s quickly dismissed as a ‘foreign nutter’ when he unwittingly intrudes into a gated ‘private garden’), curiosity, suspicion, and a love affair. Tremain particularly relishes outlining the ways in which Lev’s romantic ideas about the English are soon challenged by the realities he observes:

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The people in the street started to look grotesque to him... They appeared indolent and ugly and their heads were shaved or their hair was dyed and many of them sucked cans of cola as they walked, like anxious babies, and Lev thought that something catastrophic had happened to them – something nobody mentioned but which was there in their faces and in the clumsy, slouching way they moved.

Catastrophes come to Lev as well – sometimes through bad luck, sometimes due to his own choices, and sometimes caused by the actions of others. The novel is at its most affecting when conveying the ambivalence and uncertainty Lev feels as he negotiates different social spaces, from concert halls to care homes, in his new country: ‘I am never sure what anybody is thinking about me [here],’ he writes to his mother, ‘or what I am really thinking about them.’ Ultimately, though inspired by his time in England, Lev’s ‘dream’ can only be realised by returning home. Still, his story is the most affirmative of the three to be discussed here. But affirmation looks different when you move the story out of multicultural London and into post-industrial England.

‘There's always been Polish round here’: ‘Till the Stars Come Down’ (2024) by Beth Steel

Like Lev, Marek, the sole Polish character in Beth Steel’s play Till the Stars Come Down came to the UK on a coach on which a chance encounter with a friendly compatriot helped to ease his arrival. But we meet Marek at a very different moment to Lev: not at the start of his journey, but rather on his wedding day.

Firmly established in England by the play’s opening, he’s about to marry Sylvia, the youngest daughter of a family from a Nottinghamshire former mining town where Marek has made his new home. The drama takes place over the course of the wedding day, during which various tensions come to light, including the revelation that some of Marek’s new in-laws aren’t thrilled by this Anglo/Polish alliance.

Marek is a migrant success story, and he’s proud of it. From typically inauspicious beginnings in England – ‘sleeping on floors’, working ‘shit jobs’ – he now has his own thriving construction business. This fact alone is enough to generate hostility from some, especially Sylvia’s sister Hazel, whose husband John has been made redundant and who herself is unhappily employed at a factory where the team leaders are also ‘Eastern Europeans’ who, she believes, only ‘look after their own’. When Marek thoughtfully offers John some work in his company, Hazel can’t hold back her scorn: ‘They give us jobs now, do they?’

The setting of a post-industrial community, struggling with change and often resentful of the transformations that mass migration has wrought in the area, is crucial to Steel’s play, and makes the context quite different to the multicultural capital depicted in The Road Home. Complaining about stretched public services, Hazel reminisces about the village’s past, a time before ‘Frannie’s cafe’ became ‘The Warsaw Diner’.

Yet what also distinguishes Steel’s play is its attention to the longer history of Polish migration to the UK. Sylvia’s father, Tony, a former miner, recalls working alongside Poles in the past, and contrasts those previous dynamics with contemporary tensions:

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Tony: A lot of folk don’t realise there’s always been Polish round here. I worked with them when I started at the pit. This was in the mid-70s... There must have been 60-odd down the pits. They were married with families, having come over as young men after the war. They mixed with us, but they stuck together too... There was never any trouble between us then.

Hazel: Well, there’s a bit of a difference between 60 and 6,000.

Marek is a very likeable character, sensitively imagined by Steel, and, in the original National Theatre production, powerfully played by the actor Marc Wootton, who has Polish heritage. Hearing stories of prejudice against Eastern Europeans in the area, Marek responds by proudly describing the success of a teenager who arrived with his family from Poland speaking no English, but a few years on, was voted ‘head boy [at his school]… Not by teachers but by other children’. Such stories make Marek hopeful about the future of British/Polish relations: ‘Today there are still some problems. But, a generation from now, all will be different.’

Still, the fact that some of those prejudices are present in the family he’s married into can’t be ignored, and Marek confronts Sylvia about her reluctance to challenge her sister’s xenophobic remarks, calling his new English family ‘backward and bigoted’.

Following their argument, the newly-weds reconcile through a funny but significant role-play. Marek briefly takes on the part of the ‘threatening’ migrant he’s been cast as by others, as he playfully responds to Sylvia’s invitation to ‘Come over here’ for a make-up kiss:

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Marek: I’m coming over here! You asked for it! I’m coming for your country! I’m coming for your jobs! And most of all I’m coming for your women!

It’s a daring moment that finds a migrant character appropriating the language and stereotypes used against him. The scene, and the entire play, presents a microcosm of Polish/British dynamics in a divided community. Responding to Hazel’s insults, Marek tells her: ‘You need to decide if you are victim or superior... because you can’t be both.’

Ultimately, though, it’s Marek who’s the victimised character in the play – the subject of a false accusation, attacked and hospitalised, his final fate unknown. The hopeful, hard-working Pole becomes a tragic, scapegoated figure as the drama builds to a fraught, emotional climax. For all its rambunctious, crowd-pleasing comedy, Till the Stars Come Down finally reflects an uneasy, post-Brexit consciousness, using the format of the ‘family play’ to explore wider national tensions that remain unresolved.

#JusticeForBogdan: ‘The Thursday Murder Club’ (2025) on Netflix

Based on the first of Richard Osman’s popular series of detective novels about a group of senior sleuths solving ‘cold cases’ from their retirement village residence, The Thursday Murder Club was one of the most eagerly anticipated of last year’s Netflix offerings, especially due to its deluxe cast and prominent director. If the end result ended up disappointing some viewers, a lot of the dissatisfaction had to do with the changes that Katy Brand and Suzanne Heathcote’s screenplay made to the presentation of the novel’s only Polish character, Bogdan Jankowski.

In Osman’s novel, Bogdan is a handyman and construction worker from near Kraków, an engineering graduate in the employ of English property developer Ian Ventham and his equally unsavoury builder/business partner Tony Curran. While Bogdan doesn’t experience the direct prejudice that Lev in The Road Home and Marek in Till the Stars Come Down does, the book indicates his invisibility as a migrant worker in a southern English rural community where ‘mainly people don’t talk to him, they don’t even notice him’. And beneath the novel’s ‘cosy crime’ framework, a sharper critique of the exploitation of Eastern European migrant workers is evident.

Adding some brief exchanges in Polish, the film adaptation retains some of this critique, and even accentuates the issue of Bogdan’s exploitation, through the theme of Polish workers being denied access to their passports by their employers. But the agency of, and outcome for, Bogdan is quite different in the film.

In the book, the quiet revelation of Bogdan as the killer of Tony is not a negative judgement against the character. On the contrary, the murder is vindicated: it’s a carefully planned act of vengeance for Tony having another migrant worker, Kazimir, a witness to one of Tony’s crimes, killed.

Though several of the book’s characters are aware of his guilt, Bogdan goes free – his act of killing is presented as an example of vigilante justice and solidarity: a ‘justified’ revenge. This perspective can be seen as part of the novel’s celebration of Polish migrant resourcefulness – as another character observes: ‘There really is nothing Bogdan can’t do.’ That ‘exceptional’ migrant remains a significant character in later books in the series, aiding the titular club in its crime-solving activities.

In the film, in contrast, Bogdan (played by a subdued Henry Lloyd-Hughes) kills Tony ‘by accident’ and for a different, more self-focused reason. The film’s tone remains sympathetic towards him, but a conventional moral framework is imposed. Punched and arrested, Bogdan is last seen being taken away by the police: a ‘more cinematic’ ending, according to director Chris Columbus.

This change enraged many of the novel’s fans who were quick to take to social media to voice their displeasure, with one calling the changes to Bogdan’s story ‘unforgivable’. Anna Tryc-Bromley, Director of the Polish Cultural Institute in London, also weighed in, criticising Lloyd-Hughes’ casting and describing the plot change as ‘deeply unfortunate’. Such responses – and the appearance of a #JusticeForBogdan social media hashtag – indicate how closely readers of Osman’s novel had taken the Polish character in this very English saga to their hearts. That a fictional Polish handyman could generate such fierce loyalty speaks to something real: the hunger, in British culture, for migrant characters who are allowed to win.

Neither pity nor threat

Hard-working, vodka-bearing, sending their UK earnings to their mamas back home, the Polish protagonists depicted in the above British fiction don’t always avoid cliché. Ending in return, hospitalisation and arrest, their journeys couldn’t exactly be described as ‘positive’ either. At their best, though, these sympathetic but quite nuanced characterisations add up to something important.

Undermining simplistic, sensationalised media constructions of migrants as symbols of either ‘pity’ or ‘threat’ (even as the authors sometimes play with those tropes), the portrayals of Lev, Marek and Bogdan inspire audience empathy for these characters as they confront the challenges involved in making England home.

_{Written by Alex Ramon, May 2026}

_{The Road Home}_{is published by Vintage;}_{Till the Stars Come Down}_{is available to stream via NT at Home;}_{The Thursday Murder Club}_{is on Netflix}

Language English

polish culture in britain

stereotypes

Polish diaspora