Wioletta Grzegorzewska

(b. 1974, pen name Wioletta Greg) – poet, prose writer, English translator.

Her writing has an autobiographical slant; the axis of the storyline is often created by authentic situations, places, people.

This is already evident in the poetry volume “Orinoko” (Orinoco), with its leitmotif of events from the author’s time at university. These poems find a prose development in the novel “Stancje” (published in English as Accommodations), which grants a glance into the life of a girl who arrives to the big city to study. The plot’s turning points are marked by the protagonist’s subsequent lodgings. The 1990s, with their cultural transformations stemming from the birth of a new system, provide the background to this personal coming of age story.

Grzegorzewska depicted the girl’s earlier life in the book “Guguły” (published in English as Swallowing Mercury), nominated for the Nike Literary Award and the Gdynia Literary Prize. In the novel, the final years of the Polish People’s Republic are neither demonised nor glorified. They just form a part of reality, with both negative and positive aspects.

The author also included references to cultural elements particular to that era in the poetry volume “Ruchy Browna” (Brownian Motion). Playground gossip, more or less sensational newspaper articles and TV news add up to the image of dull reality. The latter part of the volume also includes a poem recording the subject’s impressions of life in a convent.

In the poetry collection “Parantele” (Relations), the author recalled characters with whom she was connected not only via family ties, but local and cultural ones too. This volume also paints an exceptionally vivid image of a strong but sensitive femininity, embodied for the author by eminent women known from history.

In the recent years, however, she has focused on prose. In “Tajni dyrygenci chmur” (The Secret Cloud Conductors) she returns to her preferred time of childhood and youth in references to certain motifs of Swallowing Mercury. She writes about growing up in late socialism, when Poland was going through an economic crisis, food was rationed, and young people were indoctrinated at school. In the novel, we encounter Lola and her family, who live in a village called Hektary. We are witness to the protagonist’s youthful adventures and new experiences, her first love or stay at a summer camp; but also the Chernobyl catastrophe, whose spectre – as critics noted – hovers over Hektary like a bad fairytale omen.

Grzegorzewska is the laureate of the Polish Books in London Literary Competition (2007). She was a finalist of the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize (2015), the Nike Literary Award (2015), the Gdynia Literary Prize (2015), the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature (Switzerland, 2017) and the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation (2017). She was also nominated for the International Man Booker Prize (2017) for Swallowing Mercury in Eliza Marciniak’s translation.