Maciej Hen

(b. 1955, pseud. Maciej Nawariak) – an author of historical novels and memoirs.

He joins historical costume dramas and genre conventions (including the picaresque novel, or a Chinese box composition) in a modern fashion, with contemporary, topical themes (the people’s revolt, epidemics, queer culture). Hen’s trademark is a vibrant, communicative language, deft plots and attention to detail. His memoirs go back to his youth in communist Poland.

He made his debut in 2004, written under the pseudonym Maciej Nawariak, ‘Według niej’ (According to Her). This is an apocryphal, alternate history of the life of Jesus (Hoszi), told by his nearly one-hundred-year-old mother, Mariamne. As Dariusz Nowacki wrote in his review for Gazeta Wyborcza: ‘The book is written in a remarkably colourful and utterly contemporary language, with no quirks or chancy stylistic decisions. The result is a splendid novel that joins the assets of an easy read and a book for connoisseurs.’

Similar traits are found in his brilliantly received novel of twelve years later, Solfatara. It is set in seventeenth-century Naples, during the people’s rising against the aristocrats. ‘Hen reveals the mechanisms of a revolution, of collective madness (…), but above all, it weaves an engrossing web of intrigue. And there’s another thing it pulls off beautifully – the female characters’, wrote Justyna Sobolewska in Polityka.

Hen again uses a tried-and-true historical setting in Segretario, an epistolary novel set in late fifteenth-century Krakow. The narrator here is Gredechin, a young German from Heidelberg who arrives in the Polish capital in male disguise to study medicine at the Krakow Academy. Segretario is a compelling story full of modern-day references about crossing boundaries and binary divisions.

Maciej Hen is also the author a contemporary novel with historical sub-plots, ‘Deutsch dla średnio zaawansowanych’ (Deutsch for the Semi-Advanced), whose protagonist confronts family secrets, and two books of non-fiction. The first, ‘Beatlesi w Polsce’ (The Beatles in Poland), is a tribute to his love for the famous Liverpool band, and the second, ‘Tratwa z pomarańczami’ (A Raft with Oranges), is an autobiographical journey into the past: growing up in early communist Poland, a boy from a Warsaw intellectual family reads books, listens to rock n’ roll, dreams of becoming an artist, and experiences his first loves; at the same time, he discovers his Jewish identity and grapples with the rising antisemitism that came before the events of March 1968.

Maciej Hen won the Witold Gombrowicz Prize (2016) for his novel Solfatara, which was also named Book of the Year 2015 in the Warsaw Literary Premiere survey (Culture.pl); it was nominated for the Cyprian Kamil Norwid Award and the 2015 lubimyczytać.pl Book of the Year survey in the historical novel category, and also found its way into the finalists of the Angelus Central European Literary Award. In 2023, According to Her made it to the semifinals of the Literature Prize of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), while Segretario was nominated for the Visegrad Literary Award in 2025.

Maciej Hen graduated from the DOP faculty at the Leon Schiller State Film School in Łódź, he has tried his hand at being a cameraman, scriptwriter, photographer, documentary film director, rock musician, translator and actor. He is the son of the great prose writer Józef Hen.