Wojciech Kuczok

(b. 1972) – a prose writer, poet, film critic and scriptwriter.

Wojciech Kuczok made his debut with a volume of poems, ‘Opowieści samowite’ (Ordinary Tales, 1996). He soon gave up poetry for prose – short stories and novellas. His first two short story collections, ‘Opowieści słychane’ (Credible Tales, 1999) and ‘Szkieleciarki’  (The Skeleton Women, 2002), brought him critical acclaim and a readership, and led to him being called one of the most promising writers of the younger generation. The stories in these volumes are mostly appreciated for their linguistic agility, their sense of style, their deft use of intertextuality and compositional precision. Right from the first stories, Kuczok outlined the scope of themes that would return in his work. His work falls in line with the transgressive literature movement – he enjoys breaking social taboos, writing about domestic violence, toxic relationships and traumas that come from male-female partnerships, about the suffering of heroes that makes them incapable of dealing with the world and themselves. One example of these tendencies is ‘Diaboł’ (‘Nefar’, from Credible Tales), considered one of Kuczok’s finest texts. He focused on the cruel yet tender relationship between a father and a son, without sparing the reader graphic scenes of violence.

‘Nefar’ is important in Kuczok’s output because it was a prelude of sorts to his finest book, ‘Gnój’ (Dirtbag, 2003). On the one hand, this book is the author’s play on the conventional family saga (in this case, a traditional Silesian family); on the other, it is a painful tale of a dysfunctional family in which the father mentally and physically abuses his son ‘for the child’s own good’, which permanently warps the child’s personality. Kuczok managed to tackle this difficult subject in an effective way, employing linguistic virtuosity and literary allusions.

In his later books – the short-story volume ‘Widmokrąg’ (Horizon, 2004) and the novel ‘Senność’ (Drowsiness, 2008) – Kuczok changed his style somewhat: he gave up on the language play, limited the intertextual references, became more spare with the stylistic virtuosity. He continued to explore the themes of his earlier books, however. He writes of toxic relationships, people who make the wrong decisions and yet try, in spite of everyone and everything, to rescue themselves. We see this clearly in Drowsiness, where the three main protagonists try to get their family life together, to function normally and introduce at least a semblance of order to their lives.

Film scripts hold an important place in Kuczok’s output, written based on his prose. He wrote the screenplays for ‘Pręgi’ (The Welts, 2004, Grand Prix Polish Feature Film Festival) and ‘Senność’ (Drowsiness, 2008) directed by Magdalena Piekorz. Kuczok not only collaborates on films, but also writes essays on cinema (‘To piekielne kino’ [That Hellish Cinema] and ‘Moje projekcje’ [My Projections]).

He won the Award of the Polish Book Publishers’ Society for Credible Tales (2000). He also received the Polityka Passport (2004) and the Nike Literary Award for Dirtbag (2004).