Bronka Nowicka

(b. 1974) – a writer, theatre and television director, and visual and intermedia artist.

An Associate Professor in art, a graduate of the State Film School in Łódź and the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, she works as an academic lecturer and lives in Łódź.

Nowicka’s great wealth of experience in the visual arts and film is reflected in her literary work. Her poetry debut, ‘Nakarmić kamień’ (To Feed the Stone), is made of forty-four pieces of prose poetry that explore the substance of memories, notes and things. The line between what is living and what is dead is remarkably thin, and the author uses visual, sensual images to describe this ontological ambivalence. Despite these affinities, however, it is language that proves most pliable and malleable. In one interview, Nowicka notes: ‘As an intermedia artist I speak through images, images in motion, and words. […] I must say that language is my best narrative tool. I have often found the camera, the brush, paint and the pencil to be rather clunky.’

Nowicka’s next book, ‘Kodeks pomylonych’ (Codex of the Insane), though formally described as prose, uses a similarly genre-bending language, mingling fiction, poetry and discourse. Moreover, the book is illustrated by Małgorzata Warlikowska, and paired with texts that mimic instructions. Marek Bieńczyk wrote: ‘Bronka Nowicka’s phenomenology is of a fairy-tale nature, but without descending into the fantastical: this nature only enfolds the meanings, or rather, in itself becomes a tool of philosophical speech.’

Nowicka has received many awards. For To Feed the Stone she took the Nike Award and third place in the Artur Fryz Polish Literary Award. Her film étude, Tristis, received an award for best film at the 5^th European Film School Festival (Bologna, 2002). She has presented her video- and transgraphic works at the Oslo Poesifilm visual and digital poetry festival in Oslo (2016), the European Short Story Festival in Zagreb (2017) and the International Graphic Arts Triennale in Krakow (2024). She was the winner of the New Voices from Europe project. She has been translated into Czech, Estonian, English, Hungarian, Slovenian, Croatian, Ukrainian and French.