Justyna Kulikowska

(b. 1993) – a poet.

She debuted in 2018 with “Hejt i inne bangery” (Hate and Other Bangers). The subject of her work is traumatic experience – illness, death, difficult family relationships and shame connected to her background. She presents these themes using remarkably precise language which is employed to decipher mechanisms of violence.

In “gift. z Podlasia” (gift. from Podlasie) she presents hard-hitting images of difficult experiences, both from childhood and adult life. The aim here is not to share her trauma with the world, or to perform a therapeutic act, but to find words which would describe an experience that is not individual but stems from systemic processes. This is evident in the intensity of the self-referential moments of this collection, where the subject asks: how am I to describe it? Kulikowska is not after the reader’s sympathy, her goal is to provoke a certain dissonance, which is why she bombards the reader with brutal scenes and then distances herself from them.

“Obóz zabaw” (Play Camp) is a poem with footnotes which in some ways refers to her previous collections. Here, however, the poet abandons the “pissed-off poetics” which she previously made enthusiastic use of, and instead uses chants and obsessively repeated phrases. She cites names of writers (such as Bernhard, Pound, Auden, de Beauvoir, Richter), but does so ironically, in order to depict the problem of acceptance – or lack thereof – in the literary world.

In 2018, Hate and Other Bangers brought Kulikowska the Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna Award for the year’s best poetic debut. Her collection Tab_s was nominated for the Nike Literary Award and the Gdynia Literary Prize in 2021. For gift. from Podlasie, she received (in 2022) the Gdynia Literary Prize and the Wiesław Kazanecki Literary Award of the Białystok City Mayor, and was also nominated for the Nike Literary Award and the Literary Award of the Capital City of Warsaw. In 2024, for Play Camp, she was awarded the Wiesław Kazanecki Literary Award of the Białystok City Mayor and the Literary Award of the Capital City of Warsaw. Also for this work, she was nominated for the Stanisław Barańczak Prize-Grant as part of the Poznań Literary Award and for the Silesius Poetry Award.