Snow Q to projekt artystyczny stworzony przez grupę artystów z Brighton i okolic, którzy postawili sobie za zadanie opowiedzenie na nowo i umieszczenie we współczesnym kontekście Królowej śniegu Hansa…

Snow Q to projekt artystyczny stworzony przez grupę artystów z Brighton i okolic, którzy postawili sobie za zadanie opowiedzenie na nowo i umieszczenie we współczesnym kontekście Królowej śniegu Hansa…
Even though Milan Šelj is a translator of poetry from English into Slovene, and has lived in the UK and spoken English on an everyday basis for some time, Tracing the Unspoken is his first book in Eng…
This book offers a very intricate, highly precise collage of images, each capturing something about the times we live in. It shows various versions of the discontent and crises that have become the tr…
I delved eagerly into this book, excited to have the chance to learn more about the Bauhaus outside of my more usual art-historian context. The book tells the story of a Bauhaus student, Luise Schilli…
These are very intimate poems; reading them is like peeping into somebody’s private space or spying between the pages of a diary that was written only for the author herself. There is, therefore, a lo…
The Stephen Spender Trust was established in 1997 to promote poetry and translation. In this post Anna Blasiak, poet, translator and literature co-ordinator of the European Literature Network, who wor…
This is the fifth volume in the Periscope series of translated poetry by the New York-based publisher A Midsummer Night’s Press, following One is None by Kätlin Kaldmaa, Anything Could …
A dense, tense and intense collection of thirteen short stories dealing with heavy issues, from violence, bullying, abuse and cruelty to social exclusion and homophobia, Games with Greta &am…
Maria Jastrzębska was born in Poland but arrived in the UK in the 1950s at the age of four. Anna Blasiak arrived in the UK from Poland in 2003, age twenty-nine. Both women are poets, both are queer. I…
Reading this book is like walking through an amusement park. Actually no, that would be too artificial, too unreal, while the book is so very real; there is something authentic and sincere about it, s…
There is something delicate and extremely fragile about Pierre Lepori’s poetry and about the character(s) he creates. The voice he writes in is hushed – you really need to be free of any distractions …
This is a very special collection, consisting of Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik’s poems and prose poems written in French during her stay in Paris in the years 1960–1964 and later, back in Buenos A…
I keep staring at the titles of Ilzė Butkutė’s two poetry collections – Caravan Lullabies and Carnival Moon – and I’m evermore sure that the alliteration cannot be accidental. The words mirror each ot…
Often, without much thought (and quite insensitively), we consider other cultures to be intrinsically different from our own; we imagine our communities as divided from each other by huge crevices tha…
Reading this book is like plunging head-first into deep water. You don’t know what awaits – either in the depths, or even right under the surface. You quickly learn, however, that you should expect an…
Justyna Bargielska has published eight poetry collections in her native Poland, as well as two fiction books and two children’s books. She has won some of the most prestigious literary prizes in Polan…
Visegrad Insight (issue 1[10] 2017) has published my review of Natalia Fiedorczuk’s Jak pokochać centra handlowe (“How to Fall in Love with Shopping Malls”). Thank you to Julia Sherw…
Julia Fiedorczuk, ELNet’s recent guest at one of our Euro Stars events, is known principally as a poet and a critic who popularised the idea of ecopoetry. She has published five collections of poems i…
Poland is Market Focus at The London Book Fair 2017. On this occasion British Council has commissioned a series of blogs and other texts focusing on Polish literature. Today was my turn. I decided to …
Polish books in translation? It takes some effort to find them in bookshops and even more effort to read about them in the review sections of newspapers and magazines, or to find them in public librar…
We meet the protagonist and narrator of Yasmina Khadra’s The Angels Die just before his execution. Turambo is an Algerian Arab living under French colonial rule in the 1920s. He lived in stark poverty…
The Polish writer Hubert Klimko-Dobrzaniecki spent several years in Iceland before moving to his current home of Austria. His Lullaby for a Hanged Man is partly his own story and partly that of two m…
Dygot, by Jakub Małecki, Published in Polish by Sine Qua Non, October 2015, Review by Anna Blasiak Dygot (Tremor) is a miniature saga (just over 300 pages long) about two families from rural Po…
Quiet Flows the Una, by Faruk Šehić, Translated by Will Firth, Published by Istros Books (2016), Reviewed by Anna Blasiak The title of Faruk Šehić’s novel is a reference to the Nobel Prize winn…
Czarne z białym i dużo zieleni. Rozmowa z Peterem Greenawayem Published / opublikowane w: Didaskalia 24/1998 Trzy dekady w górach Published / opublikowane w: Dialog 8/2000 Kostium jako element ‘Ge…