Andrzej Stasiuk

Andrzej Stasiuk is one of the most successful and internationally acclaimed contemporary Polish writers, journalists and literary critics. He is best known for his travel literature and essays that describe the reality of Eastern Europe and its relationship with the West.After being dismissed from secondary school, Stasiuk dropped out also from a vocational school and drifted aimlessly, became active in the Polish pacifist movement and spent one and a half years in prison for deserting the army - as legend has it, in a tank. His experiences in prison provided him with the material for the stories in his literary debut in 1992. Entitled Mury Hebronu ("The Walls of Hebron"), it instantly established him as a premier literary talent. After a collection of "Love and non-love poems" (Wiersze miłosne i nie, 1994), Stasiuk's bestselling first full-length novel Biały kruk (English translation as White Raven in 2000) appeared in 1995 and consolidated his position among the most successful authors in post-communist Poland.Long before his literary breakthrough, in 1986, Stasiuk had left his native Warsaw and withdrew to the seclusion of the small hamlet of Czarne in the Beskids, a secluded part of the Carpathian mountain range in the south of Poland. Outside writing, he spends his time breeding sheep. Together with his wife, he also runs his own tiny but, by now, prestigious publishing business Wydawnictwo Czarne, named after its seat. Apart from his own books, Czarne also publishes other East European authors. Czarne also re-published works by the émigré Polish author Zygmunt Haupt, thus initiating Haupt's rediscovery in Poland.While "White Raven" had a straight adventure plot, Stasiuk's subsequent writing has become increasingly impressionistic and concentrated on atmospheric descriptions of his adopted mental home, the provincial south-east of Poland and Europe, and the lives of its inhabitants. Galician Tales, one of several works available in English (among the others are White Raven, Nine, "Dukla," "Fado," and "On the Road to Babadag") conveys a good impression of the specific style developed by Stasiuk. A similar text is "Dukla" (1997), named after a small town near his home. "Dukla" achieved Stasiuk's breakthrough in Germany and helped built him the most appreciative reader-base outside Poland, although a number of Stasiuk's books have been translated into several other languages.