Inga Iwasiów

Writer, literary critic, professor of literary studies, editor-in-chief of the ‘Pogranicze’ bimonthly for several years, organiser of cultural and intellectual life in her native Szczecin.

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Inga Iwasiów

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Inga Iwasiów, photo: Wojciech Tołyż / Reporter / East News

Inga Iwasiów’s primary occupation is the academic study of literature. This interest has led her to write several books on literary studies and literary criticism. She is the author of the monographs Kresy w Twórczości Włodzimierza Odojewskiego: Próba Feministyczna (The Kresy Region in the Work of Włodzimierz Odojewski: A Feminist Attempt) from 1994 and Opowieść i Milczenie: O Prozie Leopolda Tyrmanda (Story & Silence: On the Prose of Leopold Tyrmand) from 2000, the 2002 dissertation Rewindykacje: Kobieta Czytająca Dzisiaj (Revindications: A Woman Reading Today), and a 2004 collection of lectures on gender called Gender dla Średnio Zaawansowanych: Wykłady szczecińskie (Gender for the Intermediate: The Szczecin Lectures). A collection of her blog columns was published in 2013 as Blogotony (Blogolumns).

She made her debut as a writer in 1998 with the prose volume Miasto-ja-miasto (The-City-Me-The-City). She subsequently published two books of poetry: Miłość (Love) in 2001, and 39/41 in 2004. All three volumes had a very small run and were published in the writer’s hometown. She introduced herself to a wider audience with the prose volume Smaki i Dotyki (Tastes & Touches), which consisted of 22 short stories.

Her first novel Bambino was nominated for the Nike Award 2009, the Gdynia Literary Award 2009, and the Cogito Public Media Award 2009. The title comes from the name of a Szczecin milk bar with a great background story – the political happenings of 1968, 1970 and 1981, and the resulting separation and return of various people. The stories collected in the book, however, are written from a personal and intimate perspective, suspended somewhere between truth and fiction. The author talked about the novel in an interview with Paweł Smoleński for Gazeta Wyborcza (24.09.2009):

I did not write ‘Bambino’ as a documentary. I didn’t search for accounts in libraries, I didn’t follow biographies. But on the other hand, Szczecin is a place of special stories, because it’s a special city. In the local section of the city’s library, there are now forgotten memoirs written for various competitions – different, I think, from memoirs from other places in Poland. I’ve been listening to these Szczecin stories for many years.

Her 2010 follow-up Ku Słońcu (Towards the Sun) is actually a continuation of her debut novel, although it can be read as a separate whole. The protagonist is the daughter of characters from Bambino, a modern woman who returns to her native Szczecin after many years to bid farewell to her dying aunt. The trilogy, consisting of the post-war Bambino and the contemporary Ku Słońcu, was completed by Na Krótko (For A Short Time) in 2012, a novel set in the near future across several European countries. A novel about the coming decades is, of course, a diagnosis of the present. Critic and author Eliza Szybowicz commented:

In literary futurism, the writer can let loose. Iwasiów remains a cautious pessimist. She does not, for example, imagine a revolution in gender roles. Even when she presents the future as a negation of current bad trends, she is as far away as possible from a vision of some great change for the better. While she writes about the restriction of the free market, which is conversely actually expanding today, she doesn’t derive any desired social effects from it. And since it’s well known that futures invented in literature are an assessment of the present, it should probably be understood that Iwasiów qualifies her critique of neoliberalism under the category of emancipatory platitudes.

The year 2013 saw the publication of an intimate grief diary, the most personal book in the author’s bibliography, Umarł Mi: Notatnik Żałoby (He Died On Me: A Journal of Mourning), recounting the death of her beloved father. Literary critic Andrzej Franaszek wrote about the book:

A diary of grief, a report of despair. A record of the feelings of a mature woman, a daughter who unexpectedly loses her father, must accept his death, not let the world around her fall apart. To tame the abyss. To help her mother, to select the picture placed on his coffin, to remove thousands of unnecessary mechanisms from the dead watchmaker’s workshop. But above all, to go on living – with an open wound, with an amputated love, with this gap in existence which does not allow itself to be forgotten. One that has to be filled in somehow, talked over, covered up with solid daily work.

Her 2014 novel W Powietrzu (In the Air) is founded on a simple plot idea, no doubt also stemming from the author’s academic interests: it is a morality/erotica tale written from a feminist perspective, an attempt to tell the last few decades of Polish history through female sex. It’s presented as the biography of a middle-aged woman from Szczecin, an editor of a literary magazine (knowing the author’s declaration, ‘I’m a theoretician of literature, so I know that there’s no simple distinction in literature between truth and fiction, because in the modes of writing, truth becomes fiction’, it’s easy to perceive here a bold play with autobiographical convention), presenting the history of her erotic fascinations and relationships, loves and passions.

The author’s next novel, Pięćdziesiątka (Fifty), is yet again a woman’s biography, but this time the main theme is addiction. The title refers simultaneously to the heroine’s landmark ‘half-century’ age and to a typical measure of vodka in millilitres. In an interview with Sylwia Chutnik for Dwutygodnik, the author said:

Gośka only looks normal on the surface. She knows that her well-adjusted appearance protects her, allows her to live her own life: no husband, no children, no steady job. Just herself and her drinking, and sometimes someone to love and have sex with. Apart from the tailoring metaphor, I gave her leftovers. Something’s falling out of Jolka’s pocket, the janitor’s carrying around some rotten meat, and my Gośka has the feeling of running on leftovers, maybe even being a leftover, which will work out for her – as it does for everyone – in the end.

Inga Iwasiów is also the originator and chairwoman of the Gryfia Literary Award for Women Authors, the aim of which is, among other things, to promote women’s work. In 2010, she was honoured with the title of Ambassador of Szczecin.

In 2019, she published Kroniki Oporu i Miłości (Chronicles of Resistance and Love). The book’s subtitle says: ‘From protest to intimacy: a novel written when we took to the streets’. Although it suggests that Iwasiów’s book is journalistic, the writer did not set her sights on an ad hoc account, but on literature threaded with themes from her earlier work, such as the intermingling of the private with the public. Critic Agnieszka Wójtowicz-Zając wrote in ArtPapier:

The rhythm and (dis)order of the chronicle are a reflection of Margaret’s world, with her private, family, emotional and sexual life – in juxtaposition with her public life, work, social involvement and exposure to others. It is an intimate chronicle of successive events, a heavy past, an unclear future, a suffocating atmosphere, a sense of being surrounded and overwhelmed.

Source: www.instytutksiazki.pl, last update: NS, November 2020, translated into English by Patryk Grabowski, May 2025

Selected bibliography:

Poetry

Miłość (Love), Szczecin: Wydawnictwo 13 Muz, 2001;
39/41, Szczecin: Wydawnictwo 13 Muz, 2004.

Stories

"Miasto-ja-miasto", (The-City-Me-The-City), Szczecin: Kurier-Press, 1998;
Smaki i Dotyki (Tastes & Touches), Warsaw: Świat Książki, 2006.

Novels

Bambino, Warsaw: Świat Książki, 2008;
Ku Słońcu (Towards the Sun), Warsaw: Świat Książki, 2010;
Na Krótko (For a Short Time), Warsaw: Wielka Litera, 2012;
W powietrzu (In the Air), Warsaw: Wielka Litera, 2014;
Pięćdziesiątka (Fifty), Warsaw: Wielka Litera, 2015;
Kroniki oporu i miłości (Chronicles of Resistance and Love), Warsaw: Świat Książki, 2019.

inga iwasiów

contemoprary polish literature