Michał Olszewski

(b. 1977) – a prose writer, journalist, Gazeta Wyborcza reporter, author of many pieces of reportage on social issues.

He graduated from Polish Studies at the Jagiellonian University. His debut volume of prose, ‘Do Amsterdamu’ (To Amsterdam), won the third Znak Publishers competition for a novel or short-story collection. The book was made up of nine pieces that create a single, tightly-constructed series. It is an attempt to show young Poles struggling to find a place for themselves in the early twenty-first century. The overarching theme facing the protagonists is a single quandary: whether to stay in a provincial and neglected town somewhere on the fringes of northern Poland, or to set off – for Warsaw, seduced by a career and money, or for Western Europe? The problem is that there are no good solutions. The choices made by the book’s protagonists are always bad; every life story cracks somewhere here.

Olszewski’s next book, ‘Chwalcie łąki umajone’ (Praise the Blooming Meadows), is a selection of neither fictionalised reportage nor travel stories, whose main protagonist is contemporary rural Poland. The writer strives to reconstruct its mental landscape. His journey through this ‘inferior Poland’ combines with the narrator’s memories of and reflections on his early youth. The narrator fends himself against what he calls ‘false mythologies’, that is, the voice of nostalgia, a maudlin recollection of the past. He tries to understand the past he explores and examines, and himself as well.

In 2011, Olszewski was nominated for the Gdynia Literary Award for ‘Zapiski na biletach’ (Notes on Tickets), and in 2015, for his reportage, ‘Najlepsze buty na świecie’ (The Best Shoes in the World), he received the Ryszard Kapuściński Award.