Polish Writers on Writing

Featuring 20th-century writers, including Nobel Prize winners Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska, as well as celebrated poet Zbigniew Herbert and internationally renowned Bruno Schulz, this collection captures the brilliance and originality of a literary culture rightly considered one of the most important and influential of our time. These writers are branded by the political realities of their country — creating literature out of the brutality of the World War II, under the numbing and inhibiting Communist reign, and finally within a free society, but one freighted with the weight of its history.

Adam Zagajewski is one of Poland’s most distinguished contemporary poets. Among his honors and awards are a fellowship from the Berliner Kunstlerprogramm, the Kurt Tucholsky Prize, a Prix de la Liberté, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the Neustadt Literary Prize. His poetry books in English include Without End: New and Selected Poems; Unseen Hand; and Eternal Enemies. His works in prose include Two Cities; Another Beauty; Solidarity, Solitude; and In Defense of Ardor. Zagajewski teaches at the University of Chicago and divides his time between Chicago and Krakow. (Adam Zagajewski)

Edward Hirsch was born in Chicago and educated both at Grinnell College and the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a Ph.D. in folklore. His first collection of poems, For the Sleepwalkers (1981), received the Academy of American Poets Lavan Younger Poets Award and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award. His second collection, Wild Gratitude, received the National Book Critics Circle Award. His recent poetry collections include The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems, Special Orders, Lay Back the Darkness, On Love, Earthly Measures, and The Night Parade.

He is also the author of the prose books The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration, Responsive Reading, and the national bestseller How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, which poet Garrett Hongo called “the product of a lifetime of passionate reflection” and “a wonderful book for laureate and layman both.” Most recently, Hirsch published Poet’s Choice, which collects two years’ worth of his weekly essay letters from the Washington Post Book World.

Hirsch’s honors include the Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, the Rome Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2008 he was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and he lives in New York. (Edward Hirsch)