Dominika Słowik

(b. 1988) – an author of novels and short stories. She graduated in Spanish literature from the Inter-Faculty Individual Humanities Studies at the Jagiellonian University.

Dominika Słowik has published in such periodicals as Akant, Bliza and Nowe Książki. She made her debut in 2015 with the novel Atlas. Doppelganger, sensually joining a nostalgic tale of childhood with descriptions of the transformation of Polish reality of the 1990s. The action of Atlas plays out in a typical block of flats. The protagonist visits Anna and her grandfather: over time, it is he, a former sailor telling girls stories of his journeys and showing them maps of unfamiliar lands, who occupies more and more of the story, making the novel branch off and follow two parallel streams. The second stream takes place in a quite different, almost entirely abandoned housing estate, inhabited by the old man and a few others. In Słowik’s work, the block of flats not just the scene of the events, it is a protagonist in its own right, living its own life. She has a good handle on the Silesia of around twenty years ago: it is dirty, ugly and revolting, and yet dazzlingly beautiful, because in art, the beauty of such places is born of longing for them.

In ‘Zimowla’ (Winter Cluster), written four years later, Słowik develops many of the motifs found in her debut, such as the grotesque descriptions of the millennial times or the mysterious blood ties between the two protagonists. Yet while her debut focused on childhood and the system transformation, Winter Cluster is the story of entering adulthood and contemporary Polish reality. Cukrówka is small town in the Małopolska province: this scenery, in 2005 – that is, right before Poland’s accession to the European Union, which symbolically closes the system transformation – is where the novel is set, where the author inflates regional trifles to become international conspiracies, mostly in grotesque fashion, while portraying the reality of post-transformation Poland with great tenderness and attention to detail. With the emergence of a new and fantastical social order, the world of childhood fades, grows distant and fairly prosaic. To make this change feel true, Słowik skilfully juggles conventions: from young-adult adventure novel and thriller to magical realism.

In a novel of 2024, ‘Rybie oko’ (Fish Eye), the action also begins in the 1990s, but the sociopolitical reality of those times has a much smaller role that in Słowik’s previous books. The turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is a subtle backdrop for a tale of universal issues: family relationships, coming of age and dealing with poverty. Fish Eye is an extraordinarily insightful look at some deadly serious matters: inequality, (sometimes unconscious) class shame and social advancement.

For her debut novel, Atlas: Doppelganger, Dominika Słowik was nominated for the Gdynia Literary Award in the prose category (2016). Her second novel, Winter Cluster, was honoured with Krakow Book of the Month award (2020) and the Polityka Passport (2019). She also received the Krakow City of Literature UNESCO Award for the ‘Pułapka Malaise’a’ (Malaise Trap, 2020) project.