Marek Bieńczyk

(b. 1956) – writer, historian of literature, translator, oenologist.

A graduate of Romance studies, he developed a love of French literature, which he translates (particularly works by Milan Kundera, Emil Cioran and Roland Barthes). He works as a historian of literature at the Institute of Literary Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences. His focus is on writings from the era of Polish Romanticism, about which he has published extensively, starting from his treatise “Czarny człowiek. Zygmunt Krasiński wobec śmierci” (The Black Man. Zygmunt Krasiński and Death, 1990). He collaborates with the French quarterly “L’Atelier du roman”, the Collegium Vini in Kraków and the Postgraduate School of Literature and Art at the Jagiellonian University. He is a member of the International Federation of Wine and Spirits Journalists and Writers (FIJEV). He has been publishing in the “Tygodnik Powszechny” and other periodicals. A wine afficionado, he writes columns about it in the press – including “Przekrój”, “Magazyn Wino” or “Kuchnia” – and books, including oenological guides.

In many of his literary pieces, Bieńczyk makes use of his historical and literary knowledge, while his scholarly works have the light touch of the essayist and veer towards literariness. This blurring of genre boundaries is a particular feature of his oeuvre: he inserts essayistic reflections into novels and essay collections feature fictionalised fragments – or rather fragments in which the narrator reveals himself and his (real or imagined) privacy. His essays are always about issues and motifs that are close to him, and the writing is preceded by research, reading everything around him: major novels, human sciences texts, architecture, flavours, smells, movement…

His literary debut was the 1994 novel “Terminal”, a love story between two scholarship holders arriving to France from different parts of the world.

“Przezroczystość”, published in English as Transparency, an essay collection revolving around the titular topic, is also a beautiful fable, a tale about dreams (the word rêve, or “dream” in French, is an anagram of the word verre, “glass”). This book displays Bieńczyk’s particular way of combining various texts and styles, like when he writes about the ancient Greek word diaphane, whose “French usage puts greater emphasis on admitting light: not entirely, but noticeably. Porcelain can be diaphane, or an autumn leaf, or parchment, the old or aristocratic skin on one’s hands”, while also recalling this line from Sartre: “the sun was clear and diaphane, like white wine”. The quote points to another characteristic of Bieńczyk’s texts: synaesthesia – which, in turn, relates to the important position accorded by his writing to senses and the way they merge, which enriches our reading of the world. Marek Bieńczyk doesn’t differentiate between his sources, he mixes the “high” with the “low” – and by doing so, invalidates such divisions. As he remarks in Transparency, writing about Milan Kundera’s attitude towards privacy: “For him, there is essentially no ethical difference between, say, the illegal wiretapping of a man under police surveillance and a newspaper publishing pictures of the singer Jacques Brel in tears while leaving the hospital where he was being treated for cancer”. In an interview Bieńczyk said that although literature is very important to him, although writing is his life, there is always “something that calls outside the window”. This “something” – discipline, or joie de vivre, create the space that is so necessary in art, thanks to which Bieńczyk’s essays are full of air, of breath, “link” us to reality, and not only to other books.

In 2012 his essay collection “Książka twarzy” (The Book of Faces) was awarded the Nike Literary Award, and a year later “Książę w cukierni” (published in English as Prince in a Pastry Shop) received the 2013 best illustrations award from the Polish section of IBBY. In 2019 he was nominated for the Nike for the essay collection “Kontener” (Container).

On 10^th December 2023 he received the Julian Tuwim Literary Award from the Cultural Centre in Łódź and the Łódź chapter of the Polish Writers Association for lifetime literary achievement.