Joanna Lech

(b. 1984) – a poet and prose writer.

She is multi-talented, using various literary forms, interested in challenging experiences, but also ordinary everyday life; her work often returns to childhood and to the theme of growing up.

She made her debut as a poet, swiftly getting noticed by the critics. ‘Zapaść’ (Collapse) is, as Karol Maliszewski wrote in his review, a book of ‘poetry at a loss for words’, through which the author, without pathos and with a sensual feeling for concrete details, explores the capabilities of language to describe what we generally fear to call by name. She addresses issues tied to becoming an adult and the accompanying disappointments.

‘Nawroty’ (Relapses) is made up of moodier poems, inspired, lyrical, multi-levelled, of obsessively returning states, as in a nightmare. These are existential poems – about decay, the passing of time, and falling into the void.

Remaining true to her characteristic sensual imagination, in the following years the poet increasingly turned to love poems. She gave this full expression in ‘Nocne i niecne’ (Nightly and Nasty), made up of strong, transparent, very musical, and thus communicative poems, in which lurches of the heart are a source of both suffering and of élan vital.

As a prose-writer, Lech made her debut with a short-story collection, ‘Sztuczki’ (Tricks), incorporating intense, subjective images from childhood. Two years later came ‘Kokon’ (Cocoon), a psychological thriller that is a study of the patriarchy and the experience of violence. Here again, an important aspect is childhood recollections and the time of growing up, often evoked in powerful, naturalistic scenes. ‘Drapieżcy chmur’ (Skystalkers), her latest novel, is the story of an everyman born in a Polish village in the 1980s who tries to extract himself from the cycle of trauma passed on from generation to generation. Other big themes include the masculinity crisis, immigrating to work, and the war in Ukraine. ‘Highly realistic prose, which, through some delicate writerly gestures, turns out to be magical’, Marek Bieńczyk wrote.

Joanna Lech has won many awards, including the Grand Prix at the Polish Rainer Maria Rilke Competition in Sopot in 2007, the Grand Prix at the Jacek Bierezin Polish Poetry Competition in Łódź in 2007, and third place in the K. K. Baczyński Award Polish Poetry Competition in Łódź in 2010.

Collapse brought her a special award for a debut in the Polish Book Publishers’ Society Literary Competition, and was nominated for the Wrocław Silesius Poetry Award in the debut category, 2010; it also received mentions in the Polish Golden Mean of Poetry Literary Competition. She has twice been nominated for the Nike Literary Award – in 2011 for Relapses and in 2017 for Tricks, which also got her nominated for the Gdynia Literary Award.

She graduated from the Jagiellonian University’s Literary Arts Studies. She has taken scholarships from the City of Krakow and Grazella Foundation (2011). She lives in Krakow.

She has been translated into English and Serb (in anthologies), as well as Czech, German, Russian and Ukrainian.