Poland

Zuzanna Ginczanka was a Polish-Jewish poet of the interwar period. She was born Sara Gincburg in 1917 in Kiev, which was then part of Russia. She grew up speaking primarily Russian and opted to live in Poland...

Russian poet and civil rights activist Natalya Yevgenyevna Gorbanevskaya was born in Moscow. She attended Moscow State University, but she was expelled for her political activities. She would later earn a ...

Aleksander Wat was the pen name of Aleksander Chwat. He was born in Warsaw, Poland, and was descended from an illustrious Jewish family. He studied philosophy, psychology, and logic at Warsaw University and...

Julia Fiedorczuk (she/her), born February 23, 1975, in Warsaw, Poland, is a poet, prose writer, translator, and literary critic. Much of Fiedorczuk’s work can be considered ecopoetics.Fiedorczuk made her literary...

Stanisław Barańczak was born in Poznan, Poland, and raised by his mother, a dentist. He earned both his MA and PhD in philology at Adam Mickiewicz University, where he also met his wife, Anna Brylka. Barań...

Anna Kamienska was a poet, translator, critic, essayist, and editor. She published numerous collections of her own work and translated poetry from several Slavic languages, as well as sacred texts from Hebrew...

Czeslaw Milosz ranks among the most respected figures in 20th-century Polish literature, as well as one of the most respected contemporary poets in the world: he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature ...

Adam Zagajewski was born in Lvov, Poland, in 1945; as an infant he was relocated with his family to western Poland. He lived in Berlin for a couple of years, moved to France in 1982, and taught at universities...

Well-known in her native Poland, Wisława Szymborska received international recognition when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. In awarding the prize, the Academy praised her “poetry that with ...

Anna Swir (Świrszczyńska) was born in Warsaw, Poland, to an artistic though impoverished family. She worked from an early age, supporting herself while she attended university to study medieval Polish literature...

Piotr Sommer's most recent book of poems is Continued (Wesleyan University Press, 2005). He is editor for Literatura na Swiecie, a magazine of international writing. His collected poems, Po Ciemku Też, appeared...

Zbigniew Herbert was a poet, playwright, and essayist. He was born in Lwów, a city then in Poland. After World War II, the city became part of Soviet Ukraine and is now called Lviv. During the war, Herbert...