Andrzej Sosnowski

(b. 1959) – a poet, prose writer, essayist and translator of Anglo-Saxon literature.

An English scholar by education, he lectures in American literature at the University of Warsaw, and in 1994 took the helm at Literatura na Świecie. He has translated such writers as Ezra Pound, John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, John Cage, Ronald Firbank and Harry Mathews. His pseudonyms include: Earthling, Mikołaj Siwecki, Andrzej Ziemiańczyk and Andrzej Ziemiański.

Sosnowski’s work has nothing to do with ready-made formulae and well-worn paths: in a way, it is off-the-cuff and arbitrary. The poet analyzes words deeply and from many angles, but not to show what they mean in reality: he more wishes to find out that in their present context, they mean almost nothing. Or: that their meaning fluctuates. As a result, the ‘feeling and speaking’ protagonist of Sosnowski’s poems gets the impression of his own randomness, and his daily existence is haunted by a sense of exhaustion, or, as the poet himself admits, ‘numbness’.

Nonetheless, Andrzej Sosnowski is aware that spiritual barrenness can only be conquered if it is acknowledged to be the key – and paradoxically, therefore near-insurmountable – problem of people’s inner life. Sosnowski’s poems fall outside the repertoire of tried-and-true wisdom and threadbare meanings. He upends the coherent notions of fiction, dream and reality, as well as nothingness. The oneiric images in his poetry do not differ radically from the ‘ordinary’ ones.

A vital attribute of Andrzej Sosnowski’s poetry is its consciousness that all being comes not directly to a person, but in a semi-fictitious state. Mass media and various social institutions have a major role to play here, yet language remains crucial. This is what repulses, complicates understanding, sentences you to nightmares or sleeplessness. In a sense, Sosnowski’s poetry involves ‘hijacking language’, taking traditional language and leading it beyond its familiar points of reference, which may come from John Ashbery’s ‘logic of strange position’.

With its condensed, multilayered and hermetic metaphors, Andrzej Sosnowski’s work is seen by many critics to be unique in contemporary Polish literature.

For his debut volume, Andrzej Sosnowski received the Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna Award for best debut of 1992; he has also received the Kościelski Foundation Award (1997) and the Odra award  (1997). His books have been three-times nominated for the Nike Literary Award: ‘Stancje’ (Lodgings, 1998), ‘Po tęczy’ (After the Rainbow, 2008), ‘Elementaże’ (Schoolbuks, 2024, final seven). In 2008, he took the Wrocław Poetry Award in the book of the year category for After the Rainbow. The same year, he was nominated for the Gdynia Literary Award in the essay category for ‘Najryzykowniej’ (The Riskiest). In 2011, he was winner of the Special Award – a Gdynia Literary Award special prize, and in 2013 he took the Gdynia Literary Award for ‘Sylwetki i cienie’ (Silhouettes and Shadows). In 2017, he was honoured with the Wrocław Silesius Poetry Award for lifetime achievement.