Król Warmii i Saturna

From the 11th floor of an Olsztyn tower block, the author’s elderly father – the eponymous king – surveys his kingdom. Through the eyes of his daughter, a forgotten history is pieced together: the history of the Warmians. This small group with long roots in northern Poland was practically obliterated by the Second World War, while those who did not leave for Germany were suppressed by the new communist regime. But their story survives with the author, one of the 148 people who declared themselves Warmians in Poland’s last general census.

In this part essay, part memoir, part eulogy, Joanna Wilengowska assembles fragmentary snatches of her father’s memories and daily life; a life that is inhabited by ghosts of the past and visited by the memory of atrocities, with stories resurrected sometimes through a single Warmian phrase. The Polish text is intertwined with German and Warmian in this multilayered and evocative account. The past mixes with the present. Tragedy rubs shoulders with comedy. With a distinctive flair, combining tenderness, humour and irony, we follow the author’s journey through her father’s identity and her own, creating a dialogue between all histories that have been left unsaid, deaths left unlamented, truths hidden, crimes untold, and graves lost.

Throughout it all, the engaging and colourful figure of the father presides over this family memoir, surveying the remnants of his kingdom. The King of Warmia and Saturn will appeal to the reader drawn to universal questions about exclusion and appropriation, identity and belonging, and how the past continues to seep into the present.