The Rising Stars of Polish Literature

portrecista_psow.jpg, default, Wojciech Chamier-Gliszczyński, photo: © Anna Chamier-Gliszczyńska. The cover of Wojciech Chamier-Gliszczyński's book 'Portrait of dogs', photo: Czarne, The Rising Stars of Polish Literature

#language & literature

One doesn’t tell fortunes from cards; one reads them. From the new, young generation of writers, we can learn a great deal about the woes of today’s world, the mechanisms of memory and the use of modern language. Here we will introduce several authors who have both the desire and the capability to shake up the Polish literary scene in the very near future.

Wojciech Chamier-Gliszczyński

A lawyer by trade, it is not clear who guided him on a parallel path to a writer’s life, but it turned out to be the right decision. Chamier-Gliszczyński came to his storytelling debut well prepared. He began with Calmly and The Bohema Club – poems published in the Szczecin journal Artefakt. Later, he made his way – twice – into the finals of the Stacja Literatura (Literature Station) festival and his story Ball-Playing Forbidden appeared in biBLioteka, the magazine of the Literary Bureau. It is quite clear that he’s most comfortable in short story formats. Even The Painter of Dog Portraits is a tale in micro scale – the modest-scale action takes place in the town of Konitz in Pomerania. The heroes of the story are loners rather than typical representatives of the human race: the self-proclaimed owner of a photo studio - and simultaneously a murderer – embodies the revenge of all women on men; a young photographer who prefers to capture images of dead dogs and women’s bodies, and the figures that accompany them in the interwar underworld. Despite all that, this surrealistic, bitterly ironic and hermetically sealed world of fiction leads the reader to concrete reflections on the nature of evil on a macro scale.

Chamier-Gliszczyński must have saturated his story with some kind of opioids that put one into a cheerful mood despite his graphic descriptions of castration, the deliberate consumption of a victim and various other bizarre scenes with a mildly erotic edge. This sort of black humour enveloping the sometimes slow, sometimes fast action is one of the brightest elements of ‘The Painter of Dog Portraits’. A second powerful element is the original idea of making manifest the cruelty and penetration of the dark side of human nature. And, while the author’s flirtation with philosophical musings might not be to everyone’s taste, there is a method in his madness which leaves the reader waiting impatiently for his next burst of creative imagination.

Igor Jarek

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Igor Jarek, photo ⓒ Polityka / Leszek Zych. The cover of Igor Jarek's book 'Halny', photo: Nisza Publishing House

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Jarek is a rebellious character and his work reflects that fact. You can see in it his poetry (Różyczka, Białaczka), his drama (Glück Auf! and the one-woman show Królowa) and in his comic books, which are illustrated by his wife Judyta Sosna (Słowacki, Spodouści, Czarna Studnia). He was born in Katowice, spent several years as a coal miner, and now lives in the Kraków neighbourhood of Nowa Huta, whose dark atmosphere he evokes in Halny. He was nominated for the Paszport award of Polityka magazine in 2020 for that collection of short stories.

You read Jarek like you’re chatting with a good friend – without hyperbole and without limits. You just have to switch to casual, sometimes unnecessarily vulgar, humourless language in order to absorb the somewhat pumped-up, but essentially catchy stories. The stories intertwine, creating an obscure thread that holds the book together. It’s just a shame that the many perspectives aren’t distinguished from one another stylistically, if only by gender – all the characters speak in a uniform sociolect. The dangerously light tone of the narrative can distract the caution of a reader who approaches Halny too superficially. Yet in these gloomy, even off-putting stories, we find a sharp critique of the modern world. The ghosts of unresolved problems haunt us and the characters are persecuted by some ancient fate: despite their best efforts to alter their fate, everything simply falls apart. Happily, Jarek is able to pull all these elements together and turn them into iconoclastic literature.

Marta Knopik

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Marta Knopik and the cover of the book 'Czarne Miasto', photo: Lira Publishing

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As opposed to the case with the two gentlemen above, with Knopik, there’s room to breathe freely. In her Black City, time flows at its own rhythm and loops around, reality blends into dreams and historical truth is enriched with legend. Knopik must have an old soul. Her story is constructed in classic fashion: it is based on the contrast between the White and Black City, pain and hope, longing and love, threat and stabilization. This is a naïve and foreseeable trick, but it works, so why not? The reader occasionally gets lost in the chronology of events, like the characters do in underground tunnels. Her work is full of symbols and metaphors that develop as you keep reading, provoking the imagination. A magical realism gives the story a certain lightness. The author manages to carry us into another parallel dimension and that, after all, is what belle lettres are all about.

Knopik, the holder of degrees in Polish philology and a fan of mountain climbing, mountain biking and scuba diving, is also an enthusiastic student of Silesian mythology. And that passion is evident in her book. In an interview with the web portal granice.pl, she said:

The most precious stories for me are connected with specific places – those I know and in which I spend time. They let me get to know anew a Silesia that is disappearing. Sometimes during the search for such legends you feel like an archeologist digging up fossils. They have to be saved from oblivion. My writing is an attempt to freeze them in time and save them for my readers.

Lovers of stories with an atmosphere should be pleased, especially since Knopik’s prose debut is also the first volume of an entire series of tales from the Black City.

Mira Marcinów

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Mira Marcinów, photo ⓒ Polityka / Leszek Zych. The cover of Mira Marcin's book 'Bezmatek', photo: Czarne publishing house

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If someone likes to copy from books sentences or phrases that contain a fresh outlook, a bit of humour or a piquant observation, he or she would just have to copy all of Marcinów. Her book Motherless is a story composed of fragments of memoirs, crumbs of daily life, random reflections. The central core is the relationship between a daughter and mother reconstructed after the mother’s death. You don’t hear any sloppy mourning laments, but rather authentic love and longing (‘Mother – a highly addictive substance’). There isn’t any whitewashing of her biography; instead there is a cold critique, an attempt at an accounting – first and foremost of herself – and understanding (Mothers, like villains, demand sensitivity’). Marcinów shows all the phases of mourning after the loss of a loved one: from pain through denial to reorganisation. However, for Marcinów these phases can get mixed up and reactions which are socially expected or scientifically defined are sometimes disregarded. Individual experiences shift to a universal level, not losing any of their intimacy.

On a daily basis, Marcinów studies the philosophy of psychiatry and the theory of insanity and works as an adjunct professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Science. She is the author of, among other works, A History of Polish Madness, for which she was nominated for the Poznań Literature Award. In 2019, she made the finals of Polityka magazine’s Science Award and, in 2020, she was nominated for Polityka’s Paszporty. Her prose debut, Motherless, is a discovery of the calibre of Marcin Wicha’s Things I Didn’t Throw Away – a book, we should recall, which won the Nike literary award. Marcinów admits that she has an aesthetic mind, that she is more interested in language than plotline and more in form than in content. This declaration is confirmed by the carousel of allusions, shrewd observations, broken threads and sharp language of the tale. The author takes a risk taking on a subject which is usually accompanied by cheap sentimentalism. But Marcinów courageously defends herself against such charges and she sets the bar high for herself.

Zbigniew Rokita

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Zbigniew Rokita, photo: Jakub Porzycki / AG. The cover of Zbigniew Rokita's book 'Kajś', photo: Czarne publishing house

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His first shot as a reporter was powerful (King of the Shooters: Football in the Shadow of the Empire) and his second recording was even better (Kajś [Somewhere]: A Tale From Upper Silesia). Rokita has moved from the broad East European sports and politics beat and returned to his home turf and, leaving behind the role of an attentive observer, he becomes a dogged detective. He apologises for his Silesian jingoism and patches together an identity ‘because Polishness is captured and polished in the first good Polish or history text, but there are no Upper Silesian textbooks and everyone creates his or her own. Being Upper Silesian is an identity one has to work for’. The author works for it passionately; he regales the reader with family history which gradually grows into a great, common history. Tiny bits of information, inscriptions on the back of a photograph, nearly vanished traces in archives and in memory gradually come together to form a whole, though cracks and gaps can still be seen. It is precisely these numerous gaps, the not necessarily visible mental boundaries in the book that are elegantly addressed and summed up in the phrase: ‘This is all very complicated’.

One must admit that the reporter has a talent for complicating matters for himself, at every turn looking for new threads at which to pull, and viewing the matter from yet another perspective. But he knows how to extract himself from this situation with his narratively compelling and literarily unforced style. The essay-reportage Kajś shows the reader a Rokita who is unrelenting, often polemical, but also reliable, proud and decisive. The author knows what he wants and he surely hasn’t yet said his last word.

Patrycja Sikora

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Patrycja Sikora, photo ⓒ Polityka / Leszek Zych. The cover of Patrycja Sikora's book 'Instructions for people not here', photo: WBPiCAK Publishing House

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She writes and fights with verse. Active on the slam and performance stages for the last few years, Sikora published her first small volume – Instructions for People Not From Here – in 2020. This is engaged creativity, not just a passive view of reality. Sikora rebels, defends, fears, accuses and inquires:

do bar codes threaten us
is z a phrase
are experiments in art necessary […]
do dogs cry
will I be happy quiz
^{[from her poem ‘heads in google’]}

Her poetry is coloured by bitter irony and anger. Torn images are intensive and hard to comprehend; they pulsate with meanings; they evolve with time. Some of her poems were published earlier in literary journals and some of them have been updated for this edition. In discussion with Agnieszka Budnik (kulturaupodstaw.pl), the poet said:

I write compulsively. I write down disconnected phrases and later I stick them together, preferably on the train. Almost all of my poems have been composed on the train from Poznań to Wieruszów.

And more:

I want each poem to be a stroboscope that puts the reader in a state of flashing. It’s a music video-book or a documentary-book which - because of flashes of Syria or an unwanted sexual initiation – lingers longer in your memory.

She was born in Wieruszów, she lives in Poznań. She writes mostly enroute and she acknowledges that her ‘poetic idiom was formed and continues to be formed by being alone in a crowd’. She was a finalist of the Połów Literary Bureau 2018 and, in 2020, she was nominated for Polityka magazine’s Paszport awards. In Instructions for People Not From Here, she effortlessly hops from one difficult theme to another (exclusion and intolerance, women’s, children’s and animal rights, consumerism, armed conflict, the labour market) and mixes dialects of discourse (advertising, religious, military, social media). Her poem entitled ‘i am looking for a copywriter to describe a type of baby carriage’ starts with: ‘the little boys from aleppo are seventy years old, the girls drive their bodies around instead of dolls and cover them with stones’. Sikora speaks out for freedom in every dimension, and the reader is offered many options for interpretation. With her debut collection, she reserves herself a strategic position on the literary scene.

Anna Sudoł

Thumbnail — The cover of Anna Sudoł's book 'Projekt', photo: Ha! Art publishing house

Born in 1990. She paints, she sings, and she also writes. In 2015, the magazine Szum published her artistic mystery ‘How Art Criticism Destroyed My Life’ in instalments. In 2020, her book Project appeared. It is a social environment novel, and at the same time it isn’t. Sudoł guides the reader closely through the tale: She has all of the characters wishing to complete a certain task (or wishing to prevent it from happening), but she never quite makes clear what that task might be. All the reader knows is that the Project is very important and that it can alter the careers of many people. Blind ambition drives skilful intrigue, the characters are clearly described and they play their respective roles well. At the summit of the hierarchy stands the Institution – the organ that decides and controls everything while itself remaining enigmatic. The Project shows us the path to the goal; the goal itself is irrelevant and, in the case of this story, it doesn’t even exist.

Sudoł has finely honed senses of hearing and observation. She freely uses the language of the ‘Project’, i.e. corporate jargon in an artsy version. The artificial relationships, arranged meetings, manipulations, exchanges of niceties, gossip and attempts to create an immaculate image – all come across as entirely authentic. It is precisely at this stage that the book leaves the field of art and, describing certain mechanisms of a hermetically contained environment, it becomes an (anti-) instruction book for use in any – not necessarily artistic – organization. With this eloquent and humour-filled story, Sudoł proves that she has the makings of an excellent novelist.

Originally written in Polish, Jan 2021, translated by Yale Reisner, Sept 2021

Language English

polish women writers