Andrzej Stasiuk

Novelist, poet, essayist, and literary critic. He was born in 1960 in Warsaw, Poland. After being kicked out of high school he was involved in the pacifist movement of the early 1980s and spent a year and a half in prison for deserting the army in a tank. Upon his release he began writing for underground newspapers, and his first book, The Walls of Hebron, a collection of twelve stories based on his prison experience, achieved cult status. With little interest in Warsaw literary life, he moved in 1987 to an isolated hamlet in the Lower Beskids, where he and his wife run the independent publishing house Czarne, which they founded in 1996. Since his debut in 1992, Stasiuk has been touted as one of the most important writers of his generation. His novel White Raven became a bestseller and has been translated into a number of languages. He is a recipient of the 1994 Foundation of Culture Prize, the 1995 Koscielski Prize, and has been nominated four times for the Nike Prize, Poland's National Book Award, winning it in 2005 for Going to Babadag, an account of his travels through Albania, and he is the recipient of the 2008 Vilenica Prize.

_{Pic. Tomasz Gotfryd}