Jacek Dehnel

(b. 1980) – poet, writer, painter, translator.

Starting from his debut poetry volume “Żywoty równoległe” (Parallel Lives, 2014), which received the Kościelski Award, Jacek Dehnel has been writing poetry described by critics as “aesthetising neo-classicism, close to academicism” (Anna Kałuża). He often harks back to the past, and his poetry draws mainly on the tradition of high culture, especially modernism. His writing is seemingly demonstratively old-fashioned; he combines the past and the present (for example, all poems in the volume “Wyprawa na południe” – The Journey to the South –are backdated to the beginning of the 20^th century) and often uses stylisation, sometimes pastiche and paraphrase. In his lyrical oeuvre, Dehnel captures that what can be relative about reality with great clarity.

As a prose writer, Dehnel debuted with a volume of short stories, “Kolekcja” (Collection, 1999), but popularity and acclaim – Polityka’s Passport Award in 2006, a nomination for the Angelus Award in 2007 and to the European Union Prize for Literature in 2009 – came with his first novel, “Lala” (2006, published in English under the same title). It is a family saga with a pronounced autobiographical theme: the central character is the author’s grandmother, Elżbieta Bieniecka, the titular Lala. The unconventional elderly woman clearly fascinates her grandson with her off-piste tales about the history of their family and of European intelligentsia. Lala is also a poignant story about the passing of time, illness and death. It is with great sensitivity and profundity that Dehnel describes the grandson’s efforts as he dutifully cares for the increasingly unwell grandmother, which makes Lala one of the most interesting examples of writing about old age in Polish prose.

The 2007 short story collection “Rynek w Smyrnie” (The Market Square in Smyrna) contains texts written in 1999-2002, so still early, but already featuring the young author’s typical characteristics: a sophisticated style, themes straight from traditional modernist prose, a multitude of cultural references, a tendency for using pastiche and stylisation. In “Balzakiana” (Balzaciana), stories published a year later, the author seemingly turned towards the modern era. Inspired by The Human Comedy, he attempted to show a cross-section of contemporary society at the end of the Polish People’s Republic and the beginning of democratic Poland. However, it is a rather untypical cross-section, as Dehnel, while writing about the modern day, devotes much space to the past, and what’s more – some of the volume’s characters, like Adrian Helsztyński from the story “Miłość korepetytora” (The Tutor’s Love), are almost completely submerged in it, completely ignoring the present.

In his subsequent novels, Saturn (2011) and “Matka Makryna” (Mother Makryna, 2014), Dehnel arrives at a new model of prose, intertwining biographical stories with fictitious variations about the lives of more or less famous historical figures. The protagonist of Saturn is the painter Francisco Goya, although his son – barely mentioned in historical sources – is no less important in the novel. Trying to understand one of the painter’s intriguing works, the cycle of frescoes entitled the Black Paintings, Dehnel writes about the traumatic relationships in Goya’s family. In Mother Makryna (shortlisted for the 2015 Nike Literary Award), the author draws on the era of Romanticism and the figure of Makryna Mieczysławska, known at the time as a martyr for Catholic faith, but unmasked after her death as a cunning swindler. Using daring stylisation, Dehnel depicts mechanisms of media manipulation worthy of the 19^th century, thanks to which Mieczysławska became one of the key figures of Polish émigré community; but also tells the story of a woman who was humiliated for almost her entire life and fights for her dignity at all costs.

Two books can be found on the fringes of the main thrust of Dehnel’s prose: “Fotoplastikon” (2009) is a collection of ekphrases, or literary descriptions of works of art, in this case photos and postcards mostly from the turn of the 19^th and 20^th centuries; and “Młodszy księgowy” (Junior Bookkeeper), a collection of column-like writings about literature, about widely-defined literary life and the author’s literary fascinations.

Since 2015 he has been writing a crime novel series set in Kraków at the turn of the 19^th and 20^th centuries with his husband Piotr Tarczyński, under the shared pseudonym “Maryla Szymiczkowa”. He is also the president of the Unia Literacka, a Polish trade association for writers inaugurated in 2017.

Jacek Dehnel has received many awards for his work; among others, in 2009 he received the Silesian Laurel of Literature for the cycle of novellas Balzaciana; in that same year, he received the Splendor Gedanensis City of Gdańsk Award in the Field of Culture for that same collection and for his translations of Philip Larkin’s poetry published in the volume “Zebrane” (Collected). In 2015 he won, together with Piotr Tarczyński, the Kraków Book of the Month for “Tajemnica domu Helclów” (published in English as Mrs Mohr Goes Missing). In 2019 Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s English translation of Lala was nominated for the EBRD Literature Prize, and the poetry collection Aperture, translated by Karen Kovacik, was shortlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and received a distinction. Jacek Dehnel was also nominated for the Angelus Award three times (in 2007 for Lala, in 2012 for Saturn, in 2015 for Mother Makryna), and for the Nike Literary Award five times: in 2019 for Balzaciana, in 2010 for “Ekran kontrolny” – Test Pattern, in 2012 for Saturn, in 2015 for Mother Makryna, and in 2017 for “Krivoklat” (Test Pattern and Krivoklat were shortlisted). In 2014 he was nominated for the Wisława Szymborska Award for the poetry collection “Języki obce” (Foreign Languages). In 2015 he received the Bronze Gloria Artis Medal for Merit to Culture.