Maciej Zaremba Bielawski

a Swedish journalist, writer and translator
Maciej Zaremba Bielawski

Swedish journalist of Polish descent, feature writer, translator (Zbigniew Herbert's poetry). Since 2012 he has been a juror of the Ryszard Kapuściński Award for a literary reportage. In 1969, after his school-leaving exam, he emigrated to Sweden together with his mother, grandmother and brothers. He delivered mail, was an orderly in a hospital and a crane operator on construction sites - that is how he learnt about life and the language. He studied history of film and history of ideas. He started to work as a journalist in 1981; he wrote reportage from Poland about the beginnings of the Solidarity (Solidarność) movement. He came to Poland during the marshal law as a truck driver. He was among the people who helped Polish democratic opposition (in 2005 he was honoured with the medal on the 25th anniversary of the Solidarity trade union). He works in the Dagens Nyheter daily where he writes about culture and politics. One of his most significant publications was his text after John Paul II's death. In 1997 in his book De rena och de andra... (The Clean and Others) he revealed a case of forced sterilizations organized by the Swedish state in the years 1935-1976 for thousands of undesirable citizens, mostly women and the homeless. The book gave rise to a heated debate in other Scandinavian countries, Switzerland and the US. A series of uncompromising articles in one of the biggest Swedish dailies gave the victims their place in a public debate and outraged the collective memory of the country that tended to turn a blind eye to dark pages of its history – that is what The Washington Post wrote about Hygienists by Zaremba-Bielawski. The book was published in Poland in 2011 (Wydawnictwo Czarne, translation from Swedish - Wojciech Chudoba). For his publications he received many awards, among them the Award of the Swedish Law Chamber and the Swedish Academy Award, several times (the same Academy grants the Nobel Prize in Literature). Recently he was awarded Johan Hansson Priset 2013 for Patientens pris. Ett reportage om den svenska sjukvården och marknaden (published by Weyler, Stockholm 2013) – a reportage on marketisation of the healthcare system. The Polish translation (by Wojciech Chudoba) will be released on 24th October, in the second edition of Polski hydraulik (Polish plumber) (Agora S.A.). Four more texts were added to the book: on political correctness, mobbing and invasion of market forces on schools and hospitals. Maciej Zaremba's wife is the Swedish writer Agneta Pleijel also well-known in Poland.

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