Małgorzata Lebda

(b. 1985) – a poet, prose writer and Doctor of the Humanities.

Małogorzata Lebda has her own, inimitable poetic idiom and a great deal of literary experience. Her first collection of verse was called ‘Otwarta na 77 stronie’ (Open to Page 77). Her next volume – ‘Tropy’ (Tracks) – came out in 2009. The critics agreed that this was where her poetry took shape and she sketched the contours of her lyrical imagination.

Małgorzata Lebda’s path in poetry began with small impressions and lyrical notes in her debut volume, to be fleshed out in narrative forms in the next collections. Her following books are filled with her inimitable poetic tales. Their subjects vary. The mythologisation of the past or childhood sensations appear in Tracks. The experience of loss, captured in dreamlike or fairy-tale images and flashbacks appear in ‘Granica lasu’ (The Edge of the Forest). In ‘Matecznik’ (The Nursery) the forest, death and bees occupy a special place – the latter as creatures that are fragile individually, yet powerful in the swarm.

Lebda’s work takes its energy and power from autobiography. She makes no attempt to hide this. On the contrary, she makes every effort for us to associate the rustic scenes in her works with her old home, which appears with its unique colours and customs, with its peculiar ethos woven from many parts. In an equally consistent manner, she goes beyond private biography, complicating the meanings of her images so that they ultimately speak not only about her, but about people as such. This is possible through her efforts to transcend realism and makes symbols of the pictures she creates. The poet’s childhood world, the village of Żeleźników, becomes a model for the world. Light and darkness, phases of the day, the night and the year, the four elements, plants, animals, the home, religious ritual and the simplest activities – all of these are parts of her stories of fate – of life and death.

Lebda’s work gained a new dimension with Mer de Glace. Its title, referring to an Alpine glacier, points to the poet’s departure from rural localities to stories of people and the world around them. The volume’s main theme is the story of a catastrophe, the end of the world, which is already happening, even if we don’t wish to realise it.

In 2023, Małgorzata Lebda made her prose debut with the novel ‘Łakome’ (Gluttonous), in which she depicts the inevitability of nature, the mortality of all living organisms, human or non-human, loss and ways of growing accustomed to it.

Lebda has won many awards. For Edge of the Forest she was nominated for the K. I. Gałczyński Orfeusz Poetry Award (2014) and for the Krystyna and Czesław Bednarczyk Poetry Award (2014). The Nursery brought her the Orfeusz Award (2016) and a Stanisław Barańczak Scholarship as part of the Poznań Literary Award. ‘Sny uckermärkerów’ (Dreams of the Uckermärkers) and Mer de Glace were nominated for the Orfeusz and the Silesius Wrocław Poetry Award. For Dreams of the Uckermärkers she received the Gdynia Literary Award (2018), and for Mer de Glace, the Wisława Szymborska Award (2022). Her novel Gluttonous was nominated for the Nike Literary Award (2024).