Julia Szychowiak

(b. 1986) – a poet and prose writer.

Her poetry has been called minimalist and lapidary. Her concise, aphoristic forms, initially immersed in a dreamlike mood, over time came to move towards the concrete and anecdotal. Szychowiak’s work addresses the alienation of the subject, existential anxieties and death.

Her full-fledged poetry debut was 2007’s ‘Po sobie’ (After Me), for which she received the Wrocław Silesius Poetry Award. Concentrating on the vanishing self, Szychowiak’s book is immersed in silence and builds an ascetic space; it was compared to the work of Krystyna Miłobędzka. Szychowiak herself confessed to the influence of Miłobędzka on her writing, saying in one interview: ‘[…] a poem is, in a sense, a receipt, an unforced conversation on many subjects. As Krystyna Miłobędzka once said: “[…] write, write, until you vanish in the writing”. I’d like to vanish in writing, in conversation’.

Szychowiak’s second book, ‘Wspólny język’ (Common Tongue), published two years later, continues her minimalist diction. Despite an even more expressive condensation of language, the author devotes more room to observing others, to common gestures and behaviour. This was to continue in later books. Published after a five-year break, Intro boasts poetics where Szychowiak becomes more communicative, using language games, paradoxes and puns to reveal and expose the pathos in public language.

In 2016, she made her prose debut in ‘Całe życie z moim ojcem’ (All My Life with My Father). The book contains condensed dialogues between the poet and her father, the painter Bogdan Szychowiak. The author’s point of departure was anecdotes on her Facebook profile; Szychowiak is known for her memes, which have given her poetry and prose a great deal of popularity on the Internet.

Julia Szychowiak has received many important literary awards and nominations. For After Me she took the Polish Book Publishers’ Society award (2008), the Gazeta Wyborcza wARTo prize (2009) and the Wrocław Silesius Poetry Award (2008), for which she was again nominated in 2015 for Intro. In 2019, she was nominated for the Gdynia Literary Award and the K. I. Gałczyński Orfeusz Poetry Award for ‘Dni powszednie i święta’ (Weekdays and Holidays). Her poems have been translated in Bulgarian, Slovak, English, German and Spanish, and included in many anthologies.