Piotr Paziński

(b. 1973) – a writer, journalist, essayist, literary critic and translator.

Piotr Paziński has emerged as an heir to the Jewish cultural and religious tradition. In ‘Pensjonat’ (The Boarding House), he weaves an autobiographical tale of the disappearance of the old world and the search for traces of family. The narrator returns to a rest home where his grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, stayed years before. The boarding house is presently clearing out, and his memories blur the boundaries between past and present. Collecting memorabilia and holding ideological quarrels, the elder residents symbolise the last witnesses to history. The protagonist, representing the post-memory generation, becomes a depository of these recollections. In his following book, ‘Ptasich ulicach’ (The Bird Streets), Paziński continues to explore Jewish identity. Its four short stories are joined by the motif of death and mortality. In ‘Kondukt’ (‘The Procession’) a funeral procession appears, getting lost in the labyrinth of the cemetery and slipping into an ‘offshoot of time’; in ‘Staruszek’ (‘The Old Man’), an old man vanishes in strange circumstances, the only trace leading back to a pre-war telephone book found in a used book store about to close down; ‘Manuskrypt Izaaka Feldwurma’ (‘The Manuscript of Izaak Feldwurm’) looks at a commemoration of the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Rising, which serves as a pretext to recall Izaak Feldwurm; and ‘Mieszkanie’ (‘The Flat’) features compelling scenes of a vigil over the body of an acquaintance among objects that stir memories. Nostalgia and subtle irony accompany a Schulzian aesthetic, and a myth-building imagination fills the void in a vanishing world. As Jan Gondowicz writes, Paziński creates ‘metaphysical narratives’ that orbit around ‘a devastated reality’.

In 1992–97, Piotr Paziński worked in the foreign department of Gazeta Wyborcza, and then, beginning in 1997, made ties with Midrasz magazine, of which he was editor-in-chief in 2000–19. His debut novel, The Boarding House, brought him a Polityka Passport (2009), a nomination for the Nike Literary Award and the European Literary Award (2012). For his essay collection ‘Rzeczywistość poprzecierana’ (Frayed Reality), he was nominated for the Gdynia Literary Award (2016) and received the Award of the Editors of Literatura na Świecie. In 2017, he was honoured with the Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński Award for his translation of the short stories of Szmuel Josef Agnon. In 2024, his essay ‘Przebierańcy w nicości’ (Masqueraders in the Void) was a finalist for the Nike Literary Award. He is a member of the Teresa Torańska Newsweek Award Chapter.