Marek Kedzierski

He is the son of a clerk and an office worker and grandson of Captain Antoni Maksymilian Kędzierski (1900–1948), one of the first Legionnaires, a participant of the Resistance in France during World War II.

Marek Kedzierski (born September 9, 1953, in Łódź) is a writer, translator, literary critic, theatre director, organizer of international festivals.

Author of eight books, a few dozen literary translations and over 150 critical texts.

Expert, translator and promoter of works of Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard and Alberto Giacometti, among others.

He was born in Łódź, where his parents had found shelter after the fall of the Warsaw uprising (mother) and the changing of the Polish borders (father), and moved with them to Warsaw in 1956.

Bray remained largely unknown until the publication of vol 3 & 4 of The Letters of Samuel Beckett which reveals that she was his principal correspondent from 1958 until 1978.

He studied Polish and Japanese studies from 1968 to 1973 at the University of Warsaw.

In 1978, he obtained his doctorate at the University of Warsaw and the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (supervisor Stefan Treugutt).

With the reviewer of the PhD thesis, prof. Jan Błoński, he published the first book in Poland on Samuel Beckett.

In 1979, he became assistant professor of Literary Theory at the Faculty of Polish language and literature of the University of Warsaw.

In academic criticism (1979–2008), his main field was oriental literature, modern writers and visual artists of the West, especially Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon, Louise Bourgeois, Harold Pinter, Robert Pinget, and David Mamet.

Since December 1981, he has been living outside Poland – in the US, Germany and France and free-lancing internationally.

He lives in Paris, Nice and Moulinet.

He is a member of the Polish PEN-Club.

After meeting Beckett in 1981, he maintained contact with him throughout the 80's – the playwright invited him to attend his rehearsals and co-adapted the text of Company for radio.

His contributions for German broadcasters (SWF, SWR, Deutschlandradio) 1988–2003 include radio essays, conversations with senior publishers and radio adaptations of Beckett's prose works Company and Watt.

In theatre, after the fall of communism in 1990, he started cooperation with the National Old Theater in Krakow and was, together with Adam Kwaśny and Marek Kalita, one of the founders of the Bücklein Theater, later the Atelier Theater.

Kedzierski has authored three novels in Polish: bezludzie (no man's earth) 1995, modliszka (praying mantis) 1996.

Since 1996, he has been contributing editor to the journal Kwartalnik Artystyczny in Bydgoszcz/Torun, Poland, for which he has prepared numerous special issues devoted to the aforementioned writers and artists, notably Giacometti, the first Polish book publication on the Swiss sculptor.

In the years 1996–2017, he organized and co-organized (in France, Germany, Poland, Switzerland and Sweden) theater festivals and meetings devoted mainly to Beckett's work[5].

As a theatre director, he has staged in Poland (Cracow and Warsaw) works by Beckett, Bernhard, Pinget, Witold Gombrowicz and J.L. Borges, in Germany (Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe, Villa Musica Mainz, E-Werk Freiburg), in the U.S.(Push-Push Theater Atlanta), in France (Le Colombier Paris, La Coupole St. Louis), and in Sweden (Helsingborgs Stadsteater).

Kedzierski has organized and co-organized several festivals in Europe and co-ordinated various productions around Beckett which put together plays, readings and adaptations of prose works.

Theatre festivals include: journées beckett in Strasbourg 1996, Beckett in Berlin 2000 (with Walter Asmus) at Akademie der Künste and Hebbel-Theater, transpositions in Cracow 2002 and 2006 at Villa Decius and Laznia Nowa Theatre, Beckett in Zurich at Zürcher Schauspielhaus 2006 (with Thomas Henkeler) as well as fail better: Beckett@111 in 2017 (with Raimund Schall) in Freiburg, Germany and Trondheim, Norway.

bez miary (no limits) 1997, published in Cracow, and one in English ( lucid intervals blind summits, Huntington 1994) as well as texts for magazines in English, German (Lettre International), and French (Europe).

Kedzierski's conversations with Bray, recorded from 2003 to 2009, have been translated into several languages, though they remain unpublished in the original English.

He interviewed Bernhard's brother Peter Fabjan in 2008.

During the interview they had a serious car accident which Kedzierski described in his prose text Aurach.

Since 2009, a regular contributor for Berlin's "Kulturzeitschrift" Lettre International, he published there long conversations with Barbara Bray, Thomas Bernhard's brother Peter Fabjan, and the internationally acclaimed theatre directors Krzysztof Warlikowski, Romeo Castellucci and Krystian Lupa.

He compiled two Bernhard issues of Kwartalnik Artystyczny in 2009 and translated five of his novels.

Kedzierski helped Bray write a personal memoir of Beckett, unfinished due to her passing in 2010.

In 2013, Kedzierski, together with the Paris-based photographer/film maker Piotr Dzumala produced a 50 min. documentary on Barbara Bray, Rue Samuel Beckett , first shown in 2013 at the Happy Days International Festival, Enniskillen, N.Ireland.

In addition to Beckett, Kedzierski has fostered the work of the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard in Poland.

As a translator, he has rendered into Polish works of Samuel Beckett (Watt, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, some other prose texts and Beckett's plays which he produced on stage, including Endgame, Happy Days) and Thomas Bernhard (5 novels), as well as of H. Pinter, R. Pinget, and excerpts of works by writers, artists, philosophers and critics (e.g. M. Walser, D. Rabinovich, A.Giacometti, G. Deleuze,  M.Leiris, J. Dupin, D. Sylvester, B. Bray) as well as one novel by the Slovak writer Jana Bénova, Café Hyena (Nisza Publ. Warsaw 2016).

He was interviewed in 2016 about his principal interests in a series of broadcasts by Polish Radio Dwojka (2nd programme of the State Radio).

Kedzierski describes his meetings with Beckett in his text Brushes, the first part of which was published in Holland in 2016.

After the Irish playwright's death, Kedzierski befriended Barbara Bray, a BBC radio producer, critic and translator who had played a major role in Beckett's intellectual and private life.