Andrzej Stasiuk

Andrzej Stasiuk (born 25 September 1960 in Warsaw, Poland) 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.

He was born on 25 September 1960 in Warsaw. After being dismissed from secondary school, Stasiuk dropped out of a vocational school too and drifted aimlessly, becoming active in the Polish pacifist movement and spending one and a half years in prison for deserting the army - in a tank, as legend has it. His experiences in prison provided him with the material for the stories in his literary debut of 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 (published in English translation in 2000 as White Raven) appeared in 1995 and consolidated his position among the most successful authors in post-communist Poland.

In 1986, long before his literary breakthrough, Stasiuk left his native Warsaw and withdrew to the small hamlet of Czarne in the Beskids, a secluded part of the Carpathian mountain range in the south of Poland. Besides writing, he spends his time breeding sheep. Together with his wife, he also runs his own tiny but now prestigious publishing business Wydawnictwo Czarne, named for its location. In addition to Stasiuk's own books, Czarne also publishes other East European authors. Czarne also re-published works by the émigré Polish author Zygmunt Haupt, thus initiating his 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 home, the provincial south-east of Poland and Europe, and the lives of its inhabitants. Galician Tales, one of several works available in English (others include Nine, Dukla, Fado, and On the Road to Babadag), conveys an impression of the style developed by Stasiuk. A similar text is Dukla (1997), named after a small town near his home. Dukla marked Stasiuk's breakthrough in Germany and helped him build his most appreciative readership outside Poland, although a number of his books have been translated into several other languages.

A certain exception to the stylistic preferences in Stasiuk's more recent work is the 1998 novel Dziewięć ("Nine"), which is set in Warsaw and records the changes affecting urban Polish society after the collapse of communism.

Stasiuk himself cites Marek Hłasko as a major influence; critics have compared his style of stream of consciousness travel literature to that of Jack Kerouac. Stasiuk admitted that he "always wanted to write a Slavonic On the Road and place it in a quite geographically limited and historically complicated space"[1]. Stasiuk's travelogue Jadąc do Babadag ("Travelling to Babadag"), describes a journey from the Baltic Sea down to Albania, and arguably comes close to this ideal. In Stasiuk's own words, "[t]here is no individual, human story in this book [...]. I wanted rather to write about geography, landscape, about the influence of material reality on the mind". Jadąc do Babadag received the Nike Award for the best Polish book of 2000.

Apart from (semi-) fictional writing, Stasiuk also tried his hand at literary criticism (in Tekturowy samolot / "Cardboard Aeroplane", 2000) and quasi-political essayism on the notion of Central Europe (together with the Ukrainian writer Yuri Andrukhovych) in Moja Europa. Dwa eseje o Europie zwanej środkową ("My Europe: Two essays on the Europe called 'Central'"). Stasiuk frequently contributes articles to Polish and German papers.

Stasiuk's least typical work is Noc ("Night"), subtitled "A Slavo-Germanic medical tragifarce", a stageplay commissioned by the Schauspielhaus of Düsseldorf, Germany, for a theatre festival to celebrate the enlargement of the European Union in 2004. In the guise of a grotesque crime story, Stasiuk presents two imaginary nations, symbolising Eastern and Western Europe and easily recognisable as Poles and Germans, who are entangled in an adversarial but at the same time strangely symbiotic relationship.

In 2007, Stasiuk continued to deal with the Polish-German topic in a travelogue titled Dojczland, in which he described his impressions of Germany from his reading tours there.

In an interview in 2007, Stasiuk commented on his fascination with the topic as follows:

In an interview with Wprost at the close of 2011, he again discussed Europe and, in particular, Germany.

In an interview, Stasiuk confessed his preoccupation with his area and a lack of interest in western Europe: "I haven't been to France or Spain and I’ve never thought about going there. I am simply interested in our part of the world, this central and eastern reality. My God, what would I be doing in France ..."