Agata Puwalska

A poet, translator and animator of the literary scene.

A member of KONTENT Publishers. An author tied to the Krakow School of Poetry and the Polish Stoner scene. She has published in Tlen Literacki, Drobiazgi, Zakład, Wizje, Iglica, Trytytka, Twórczość, Znak and 8. Arkusz Odry. Her poetry combines inspirations from culture and pop culture, avant-garde traditions and a bold approach to language. She also translates from the Portuguese – in KONTENT she has published translations of poems by Paulo Leminski, a Brazilian writer and poet with Polish roots. In the same magazine she has also published a series of editorials, ‘Składam ogień’ (I Build a Fire). She has won the UNESCO Krakow City of Literature Award twice. She lives and works in Krakow, where she actively participates in the literary scene.

She made her debut with haka! (2021) having won the fourteenth edition of Biuro Literackie’s The Hunt: Poetry Debuts; her poems were previously published in an almanac that collected pieces by project participants. In Puwalska’s poetry debut, we see a clear fascination for perception and its object – stimulus, experience, information. In haka! front and centre is the over-stimulation of the modern-day subject, immersed in the chaos of information technology, and thus disjointed, deconstructed. Published the following year, PARANOIA BEBOP (2022) has Puwalska’s characteristic allusions to pop culture, above all films and anime series, and an interest in character-building and putting narrative components in a poem. Then, in ‘Otwarte światy’ (Open Worlds, 2024), for which the poet was nominated for the Gdynia Literary Award in 2025 and was singled out for literary residency in Gdynia, and in ‘Funky Forest. poemat pozoru’ (Funky Forest: An Epic of Artifice, 2024) – books written, to some degree, parallel to one another – we finds the poet inspired by the historical avant garde and theories built around it, that is, the legacies of Franciszka and Stefan Themerson and Władysław Strzemiński, respectively. In both these volumes, the tendencies indicated above, present in the previous books, are creatively developed, and the poet explores a diverse multiplicity of characters, stimuli and states.

Puwalska’s poems have been translated into Spanish, Danish, and Latvian. In 2024, a Ukrainian version of PARANOIA BEBOP was released, translated by Yuri Zavadskij. The poet’s works have appeared in anthologies, such as ‘Wiersze dla opornych’ (Poems for the Stubborn, 2020) and ‘Odwrócona strefa. Dramaty, wiersze i opowiadania na setne urodziny Tymoteusza Karpowicza i Tadeusza Różewicza’ (Zone of Reversal: Plays, Poems, and Short Stories for the 100^th Anniversary of Tymoteusz Karpowicz and Tadeusz Różewicz, 2021); they have also been featured in the Book Institute Catalogue, New Books from Poland 2025.