Adrian Sinkowski

(b. 1984) – a poet; by education a librarian, by profession a copywriter.

He debuted in 2005 in the Pogranicza bimonthly, and since then he has published in such journals as Arcana, Dwutygodnik, Kultura Liberalna, Odra, Twórczość, Więź, Zeszyty Literackie, Kresy, Tygodnik Powszechny and Uważam Rze. He was editor, and later collaborator with the literary quarterly Wyspa (2007–17). He wrote volumes of poetry released in the Topos Library: ‘Raptularz’ (Scrapbook, 2016) and ‘Atropina’ (Atropine, 2018).

Sinkowski’s poetry stands out with its great number of rhythmic works (and more rarely, rhyming ones), a conscious and creative allusion to the classical metre of the Polish poem. In a formal sense, Sinkowski’s work comes from the high culture tradition; we see this in the prominent melody of the poem and the regular division into stanzas, mostly four-line, with an extremely skilled use of enjambment. In thematic terms, Sinkowski tries to describe today’s world in statu nascendi, and because this is essentially very dynamic and hard to grasp, his attempts to express its expansiveness and vitality include lists, largely based on an array of objects available to the contemporary person. Sinkowski’s poetry is thus mainly an apotheosis of the detail, while the poet becomes a chronicler of existence.

Sometimes the key to reading Sinkowski’s various poems that construct his carefully assembled and sublime volumes is the past. According to Wojciech Kaliszewski, ‘in these poetic expeditions into the past there is something truly extraordinary that joins with the secret of existence, in which the world’s spiritual dimension is gleaned through its physical shape’ (Fronda Lux, 2016, no. 80), while Karol Maliszewski stressed that Sinkowski’s work has ‘the spirit of confronting what is with what was’ (Akcent 2019, no. 2).

Adrian Sinkowski has won scholarships from the City of Warsaw (2013) and the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage in literature (2017) – he was singled out in the Creative Valley competition (2008), and was also the winner of the Połów project (2011), and has been nominated for the City of Warsaw Award (2017), the Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński Award for best volume of the year for ‘Orfeusz’ (Orpheus, 2019), the Józef Mackiewicz Literary Award (2019), the Cyprian Kamil Norwid Masovian Voivodeship Council Award (2019) and the Identitas Award (2023).