Mikołaj Łoziński

(b. 1980) – a prose writer, photographer and the son of documentary filmmaker Marcel Łoziński.

He made his literary debut with ‘Płacz Watermana’ (‘Waterman’s Tears’) in Topos bimonthly in 1998. Graduating from high school in 1999, he set off for Paris, where he studied sociology at the Sorbonne and made a living placing photographs in the press. In 2004, he returned to Poland.

His novel debut, Reisefieber, came out in 2006. The following years saw his prose develop, in part through a Book Institute and Villa Decius Association Homine Urbani scholarship for writers and translators in 2007. In 2022, he was a literary resident of ERGO Hestia and the Wisława Szymborska Foundation; he lived in the poet’s Krakow flat and collected material for a novel, ‘Stramerowie’ (The Stramers), a sequel to Stramer, published three years before.

His novel Reisefieber was declared one of the most interesting and promising debuts of its time. Right from his first book, Łoziński showed he was a mature and technically skilled writer; he surprised readers by writing prose that stepped outside the magic circle of traditional Polish themes. He wrote a subdued and intimate book with no hot topics from the newspaper headlines or stylistic extravagances. The main protagonist of Reisefieber is thirty-eight-year-old Daniel, living in the United States, a onetime journalist trying to realise his literary ambitions. After the death of his mother, with whom he fell out of touch many years before, he flies to Paris, the city of his childhood and youth, to put her things in order. The trip to France turns into the protagonist’s difficult and unexpected journey to his own roots.

After the success of his debut, Łoziński began to seek new solutions and inspirations. His next book was ‘Bajki dla Idy’ (Fairy Tales for Ida), a series of animal fables. This is prose for both children and adults, in which the sometimes amusing, sometimes sad travails of a mud turtle, dog, fruit fly, bacteria and myna bird turn into universal parables of human dreams, yearning and loneliness.

In ‘Książka’ (The Book), which received the Polityka Passport, the characters are nameless: Father, Grandpa, Older Brother or Younger Son, which separates them from concrete identities and socio-political reality. The anonymity of the protagonists is in line with the neutral title – The Book. In deciding on this title, the author claimed that every first story that pop’s into a writer’s head is a family story, which must be written, sooner or later.

Łoziński has also written a picture book, ‘Prezent dla dwojga’ (A Present for Two), in collaboration with illustrator Janek Koza.

Łoziński’s next books were also well received – two polyphonic tales of the fates of a Jewish family in inter-war Tarnów, Stramer and The Stramers. The author paints an evocative family portrait in which every protagonist is portrayed individually and vividly, and personal motivations tangle with family problems. In Stramer, historical conflicts gradually come to the fore and envelop everyday life. In The Stramers, war separates the family, who try to build a semblance of normalcy for themselves.

Łoziński has won many awards. In 2006, Reisefieber took the Culture Foundation Award, a year later, the Kościelski Foundation Award, and a nomination for the Nike Literary Award. Fairy Tales for Ida was called most beautiful book of the year by The Baltic Sea Region Janis Baltvilks International Prize. The Book received a Polityka Passport in 2012. Stramer was nominated for the Nike Literary Award in 2020, and was also a finalist for the Angelus Central European Literary Award.