Zygmunt Miloszewski is in the spotlight for European Crime Night, featured alongside one of Denmark’s celebrated writers, Pia Juul. The author of A Grain of Truth is to be interviewed by journalist and literary critic Rosie Goldsmith
Miłoszewski is a Polish novelist, journalist and editor, currently working as a columnist for Newsweek. Born in Warsaw in 1976, he is the author of books across a variety of genres. His horror novel The Intercom was published in 2005, and The Adder Mountains, a book for young readers, appeared the following year. English language readers will be most familiar with him for his crime series featuring Teodor Szacki, Polish State Prosecutor. Released by Bitter Lemon Press, a London-based independent publisher specialising in contemporary crime fiction, the first in his Szacki trilogy, Engagement (2010), followed the worldweary prosecutor through modern Warsaw, investigating a murder with murky links to the Communist era. A Grain of Truth, the second in the series and again translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, was published in January 2013. Moving his sleuthing protagonist from the capital to provincial Sandomierz in southeast Poland, Miłoszewski delves into history once more, when a series of seemingly ritual murders force Szacki to delve into the tangled realm of Polish-Jewish relations.
In an interview with Richard Jackson, Miłoszewski said:
Crime fiction has stopped being a simple "whodunit" of the Agatha Christie kind long ago. Thanks to writers such as Henning Mankell or Ian Rankin, people expect a crime novel to give them not just an intriguing puzzle, but also an incisive portrait of a community. [...] It’s not from the newspapers, but it’s thanks to Mankell, Larsson, Nesbø, and Fossum, that we have found out Scandinavia is not just a set of boring countries with a high standard of living. Now it’s time for other parts of the world—I hope Poland will blaze a trail and set a fashion for crime fiction from behind the iron curtain.
Miłoszewski is currently writing his third and final Szacki mystery.
His presence at European Crime Night is supported by the European Commission and the Polish Cultural Institute in London. Part of the European Literature Night 2012 organised by EUNIC London.
Thursday 9th of May, 2013 at 6.30 pm
New Writing North
The Lit & Phil
23 Westgate Road
Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 1SE