Polish

Czesław Miłosz, born in Šeteniai in the Kovno Governate of the Russian Empire in 1911, was a Polish-American poet, prose writer, translator, and diplomat. Regarded as one of the great poets of the 20^th century, he won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature. In its citation, the Swedish Academy called Miłosz a writer who "voices man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts".
Miłosz survived the German occupation of Warsaw during World War II and became a cultural attaché for the Polish government during the postwar period. When communist authorities threatened his safety, he defected to France and ultimately chose exile in the United States, where he became a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His poetry—particularly about his wartime experience—and his appraisal of Stalinism in a prose book, The Captive Mind, brought him renown as a leading émigré artist and intellectual. His memoir books like Dolina Issy (1955) give a vivid picture of the Lithuanian landscape as seen by a child of the Polish gentry.
Throughout his life and work, Miłosz tackled questions of morality, politics, history, and faith.

As a translator, he introduced Western works to a Polish audience, and as a scholar and editor, he championed a greater awareness of Slavic literature in the West. Faith played a role in his work as he explored his Catholicism and personal experience.
Miłosz died in Kraków, Poland, in 2004.

Dorota Stroińska, born in Poznań in 1965, has been living in Berlin since 1986. She studied German and Slavic Literature in Poznań, Berlin and New York. Since 1994 she has been working as a literary translator from German into Polish (including Karl Jaspers, Rüdiger Safranski, Lutz Seiler, Christian Kracht, Sibylle Lewitscharoff, Ilse Aichinger), but also from Polish into German (including Wojciech Kuczok, Aleksandra and Daniel Mizieliński).

She was honoured with the award of the Polish Translators Association (for her translation of Nietzsche by Karl Jaspers, 1998) and nominated for the Central European ANGELUS Literature Award (together with Lutz Seiler for Kruso, 2018). She published essays and reviews in magazines like SINN UND FORM, OSTEUROPA, stadtsprachen magazin, literaturport.de.

She regularly acts as a juror, curates and moderates cultural programmes, literary events and readings for adult and young readers. She founded the German-Polish translator sztamtysz, a periodically meeting of translators in Berlin, did research on theory and practice of literary translation, leads translator seminars (ViceVersa, advanced training programme KRANICHE/ŻURAWIE) and teaches at universities. She recently co-founded a literature festival translationale berlin.

Malgorzata Czerminska is a Professor at the University of Gdansk, Poland, and specialises in non-fiction, theory and history of autobiography, geopoetics and links between literature and visual art.

She has lectured in Polish literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (USA) and Cambridge (UK). Her most important book is The Autobiographical Triangle. Wittness, Confession, Challenge, Berlin 2019, Peter Lang.

Czyżewski, born in Warsaw in 1958, is a practitioner of ideas, writer, translator, publisher and director. Co-founder of the Borderland Foundation and the Center "Borderland - of arts, cultures, nations" in Sejny and the International Center for Dialogue in Krasnogruda, on the Polish border to Lithuania,. Professor at the University of Bologna. Animator of intercultural dialogue in various borderlands of the world.

For his last book of essays, W stronę Xenopolis (Towards Xenopolis), he was awarded the Ambassador of New Europe Award. In May 2021, he was awarded the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth Prize by the parliamentary assemblies of Lithuania and Poland.

Born in 1974, Daniel Odija is a writer and journalist, living in Słupsk, Pomerania. He is the author of the collection of short stories Glass works (2005) as well as the novels The Street (2001), Sawmill (2003), Don’t Let It Be A Dream (2008) and Chronicle of the Death (2010). Odija’s books have been translated into French, German and Ukrainian.

He was granted the Pomeranian Artistic Award 2001 for his debut novel The Street, which caused a scandal. Sawmill won the Pomeranian Artistic Award 2003 and Prize for the best Gdańsk’s book, it was also nominated for the NIKE Award in 2004 – the most important award in Poland; a theatre production based on The Sawmill has been directed by Agnieszka Olsten. Don’t Let It Be A Dream was nominated for the European Literature Award in 2009, Chronicle of the Dead was nominated for the NIKE Award in 2011.

Odija does not limit himself, however, to painting precise pictures, which are often even meticulous in their description, and describing the specifics of our "here and now". His texts time and again break realistic conventions, aiming for universality or even allegory. Thus his stories about everyday concerns and problems turn into stories about the passing of time and how one reconciles oneself to it, of the eternal cycle of birth and death, and the struggle between good and evil. Odija's precise descriptions of the present are saturated with a fleeting poetry.