Barbara Woźniak

(b. 1980) – a writer, sociologist and academic scholar professionally researching social gerontology.

She takes a literary look at old age, sickness and dying, and an individual’s confrontation with the health system, in her debut novel, ‘Niejedno’ (A Thing or Two).

Her main protagonist is Szymon, an academic lecturer running courses on medical ethics. He divides his life between Krakow, where he works (and where his ex-wife and adolescent daughter reside), and Tarnów, where he was born and decides to return, to tend to his father, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

In formal terms, Barbara Woźniak’s book is an interesting and bold collage. The traditional narrative is compounded with ‘unliterary’ elements – fragments of lectures, old notes from studies found while cleaning the family house, an outline of a book on the medicine of the Third Reich, a scientific article, and a list of chores hanging on the refrigerator. Especially convincing are the transcripts of conversations between Szymon and his daughter in chat programs and text messages.

As Iwona Kościelniak wrote in her review for artPAPIER: “The experience of his father’s illness ultimately make the main protagonist become skeptical of the values he had professed. The academic knowledge of ethics, to which he had been so committed, seems out of touch with reality.”

An important aspect of this book is its intertextuality and erudition that does not encumber the story. In some respects, A Thing or Two can also be read as a campus novel, a genre practically absent in Polish contemporary literature.

The author won the UNESCO Krakow City of Literature Award (2021). For A Thing or Two she received the Witold Gombrowicz Award in 2022.

Barbara Woźniak is an assistant professor at the Sociology of Medicine Institute of the Jagiellonian University Medical College, and the author of dozens of publication, articles, and chapters of academic books, mainly on themes connected to the sociology of medicine. She has published literary pieces in Znak, Czas Literatury and Ruch Literacki. She writes short stories, and has also tried her hand at a drama.

She lives in Kraków.