The selection comprises 12 works by a wide range of Polish authors including Nobel Prize-winning writer Olga Tokarczuk.
Other standout names include Maria Kuncewiczowa, Marek Hłasko, Hanna Krall, Antoni Libera, and Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, one of Poland’s foremost 20th-century literary figures.
The Oxford University Press writes on its website that “each story captures a phase of Warsaw’s past, through the interwar period as a Polish republic, the Second World War and the city’s Nazi occupation, the post-war city in ruins and its rebuilding under the communist regime, and its new status as the capital of an independent Poland in 1989.”
It adds that “with each story set in a specific part of the city, the collection becomes a guidebook to Warsaw’s temporal, spatial, and psychological geography," providing "a chronological account of the city’s tumultuous and dramatic history."
Warsaw Tales is set to be published on September 12, in a translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, one of the most prominent translators of Polish literature into English.
Her translation of Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2019.
Lloyd-Jones' work as a translator also includes Paweł Huelle’s Cold Sea Stories, Jacek Dehnel’s Saturn, Zygmunt Miłoszewski’s A Grain of Truth, Artur Domosławski’s Ryszard Kapuściński, A Life, Wojciech Jagielski’s The Night Wanderers, and Janusz Korczak’s Kaytek the Wizard.
In 2019, Lloyd-Jones received the Silver Gloria Artis Medal of Cultural Merit from the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.
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Source: Oxford University Press