Renata Lis

(b. 1970) – a writer, translator from French and Russian, and journalist.

Renata Lis specialises in biographical essays, in which she joins fragments of letters and diaries, interpretations of literary texts, and information about the lives of writers with her own reflections as she investigates their lives. Her interests include the vocation of the writer and their struggle with fate, the creative process and the complex relationships between the artist and her surroundings. In her most recent books, Lis has raised the subject of lesbian love and life in a homosexual partnership in today’s Poland.

Her first book, ‘Ręka Flauberta’ (The Hand of Flaubert), came out in 2011 and was reviewed enthusiastically. The hand of the title (the right one, with burns) is a symbol of the youthful Romantic experience, with which the author broke late in life. It is also, according to Jerzy Jarzębski, a stigma of the author’s painful experiences of illness and the looming shadow of death. The short, essayist chapters hold the major elements of the life of the hermit of Croisset – his childhood, travels, friendships, loves and work method.

Lis’s 2015 book, ‘W lodach Prowansji. Bunin na wygnaniu’ (Amid the Ice of Provence: Bunin in Exile) focuses on the later period of Russia’s first Nobel-Prize winner. The book speaks of the difficulties of life as an émigré, living in France during World War II, the writer’s late love for Halina Kuznyetsova, taking the Nobel Prize in 1933, and the consequences of this event. A romantic and a despot, Bunin was filled with passion for the world, but also a miserable egoist; Renata Lis ensures he never ceases to fascinate and astonish.

In her essay Lesbos, the writer addresses the topic of female love, using the biographical method she has mastered. Various protagonists meet on the isle of Lesbos: Sofia Parnok, Anna Kowalska and Jeanette Winterson, connected by the poet Sappho. Lis returns to the subject of lesbian love in ‘Moja ukochana i ja’ (My Darling and I), the intimate story of a relationship with a woman, in which she frankly shows how the socio-cultural reality of being a lesbian in Poland has changed, and the difficulties with which a homosexual couple must contend.

Lis has also translated from French and Russian. She joined Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz in preparing a new translation of Gustave Flaubert’s Three Tales, published in 2009. She has also translated essays by Jean Baudrillard and Roland Barthes, and a selection of prose by Ivan Bunin, and works by Vasily Rozanov, Leonid Byezhin and Sergei Kozlov.

Her articles and essays have appeared in Twórczość, Topos, Rzeczpospolita, Gazeta Wyborcza, Zadra and Charaktery. Her essay ‘Rosja nie istnieje / Sto czterdzieści milionów prawd o Rosji’ (‘Russia Doesn’t Exist / One Hundred and Forty Million Truths about Russia’) was nominated for the Grand Press Award in 2019, in the journalism category.

In 1998, Renata Lis was singled out by the Association of Polish Translators for her translation of Jean Baudrillard’s America. She has also won the Raczyński Library in Poznań Award (2012) and the Skrzydła Dedala Literary Award from the National Library (2016). She has received distinctions in the Józef Mackiewicz Literary Award for The Hand of Flaubert. All her books have been nominated for the Nike Literary Award. For Amid the Ice of Provence she also received a nomination for the Gdynia Literary Award, the Gryfia Literary Award for Women Authors, and the Angelus Central European Literary Award.