Famous at home. Unknown in English.

Nike 2024 · Shortlist

Voracious

Łakome

Małgorzata Lebda · 38 when first published

Novel · 302 pages · Nature, Family

AIAI-generated summary:In May, two women leave their old lives behind and come to a remote village at the end of the world. Róża falls ill, her husband takes apart the order he built all his life to save her, and Maja faces a change she cannot accept.

Nike 2019 · Shortlist

Mud Sweeter than Honey: Voices of Communist Albania

Błoto słodsze niż miód. Głosy komunistycznej Albanii

Margo Rejmer · 33 when first published

Nonfiction · 339 pages · Politics, Historical

AIAI-generated summary:Albanians who lived under Enver Hoxha's communist dictatorship recall internal exile, labour camps, desperate escapes and lives given up to the regime's ideology.

Nike 2018 · Shortlist

I'd Like to Say Sorry, but There's No One to Say Sorry To

Rejwach

Mikołaj Grynberg · 51 when first published

Short stories · 128 pages · Historical

AIAI-generated summary:Thirty stories about the lives of Jews in Poland today, some denying their identity, some hiding it, some telling antisemitic jokes, as the memory of the second and third generations returns in new forms.

Nike 2017 · Shortlist

The Birds They Sang: Birds and People in Life and Art

Dwanaście srok za ogon

Stanisław Łubieński · 33 when first published

Nonfiction · 202 pages · Nature

AIAI-generated summary:Essays that mix bird-watching, field trips and nature writing with art, literature, film and history, from a wagtail in a poem to the search for the grave of a Prussian ornithologist.

Nike 2016 · Shortlist

Poland 1945: War and Peace

1945. Wojna i pokój

Magdalena Grzebałkowska · 43 when first published

Nonfiction · 413 pages · Historical, War, Migration

AIAI-generated summary:Reportage on 1945, the most dramatic year of the century in Poland, told by the last living witnesses: refugees, resettled families, children who survived the Holocaust, looters and those who barely escaped death.

Nike 2015 · Shortlist

Sońka

Sońka

Ignacy Karpowicz · 38 when first published

Novel · 204 pages · War, Love, Historical

AIAI-generated summary:Igor, a successful theatre director stranded out of mobile range in a remote village, meets old Sońka by the road, whose life ended long ago in the war, and begins to turn her story into a play.

Nike 2015 · Shortlist

Swallowing Mercury

Guguły

Wioletta Greg · 40 when first published

Short stories · 115 pages · Coming of age, Autofiction

AIAI-generated summary:Wiolka grows up in Hektary, a small village in the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland in communist Poland, among school, beetle hunts, talks with her father, a mysterious seamstress and the wait for John Paul II's visit.

Also: Warwick Prize 2017 shortlist

Nike 2013 · Shortlist

Adventures on a Desert Island

Przygody na bezludnej wyspie

Maciej Sieńczyk · 40 when first published

Novel · 143 pages

AIAI-generated summary:A graphic novel built like a set of nested boxes, full of mysteries and uncanny happenings on a desert island.

Nike 2012 · Shortlist

Miłosz: A Biography

Miłosz. Biografia

Andrzej Franaszek · 40 when first published

Nonfiction · 959 pages · Historical

AIAI-generated summary:A biography of the poet Czesław Miłosz, the fruit of ten years of research in Poland, Lithuania, France and America, showing a man of passions and errors who made dramatic personal and political choices.

Nike 2012 · Shortlist

History of a Disappearance: The Story of a Forgotten Polish Town

Miedzianka. Historia znikania

Filip Springer · 29 when first published

Nonfiction · Historical

AIAI-generated summary:Miedzianka, once German Kupferberg, a small mining town near Jelenia Góra with seven centuries of history, no longer exists. The author spends two years asking why it vanished.

Nike 2010 · Shortlist

The Night Wanderers: Uganda's Children and the Lord's Resistance Army

Nocni wędrowcy

Wojciech Jagielski · 49 when first published

Nonfiction · 329 pages · War

AIAI-generated summary:In northern Uganda, children abducted by Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army are turned into killers; a reporter visits a rehabilitation centre where those who escaped, rejected by their families, try to return to normal life.

Nike 2009 · Shortlist

Gestures

Gesty

Ignacy Karpowicz · 32 when first published

Novel · 260 pages · Family

AIAI-generated summary:Grzegorz, a forty-year-old theatre director, leaves his flat in Warsaw to visit his mortally ill mother in Białystok and finds how little they share.

Nike 2007 · Shortlist

My First Suicide

Moje pierwsze samobójstwo

Jerzy Pilch · 54 when first published

Short stories · 298 pages · Autofiction

AIAI-generated summary:Linked stories about a boy from Wisła raised in a strict Protestant home, from his first carefully rehearsed suicide attempt to his life as a lonely writer past fifty who drinks.

Nike 2007 · Shortlist

Flaw

Skaza

Magdalena Tulli · 51 when first published

Novel · 177 pages

AIAI-generated summary:On a city square that the narrator brings into being before our eyes, with a tram going round, a notary, a radical student, a sleepy policeman and a young maid go about an ordinary day, until something seems to be happening to the state.

Nike 2007 · Shortlist

Gottland: Mostly True Stories from Half of Czechoslovakia

Gottland

Mariusz Szczygieł · 40 when first published

Nonfiction · 237 pages · Historical, Politics

AIAI-generated summary:Stories of twentieth-century Czechoslovakia told through the lives of its people: a film star Goebbels wept over, the sculptor of the world's largest Stalin monument, a singer silenced for twenty years, the shoe magnate Tomáš Baťa.

Nike 2007 · Shortlist

Colonies

Kolonie

Tomasz Różycki · 36 when first published

Poetry · 84 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Poems that travel back into childhood and its adventure books, with titles like Cape Horn or Her Majesty's Sailing Ships, and ask what writing poems does to a life.

Nike 2006 · Shortlist

Lovetown

Lubiewo

Michał Witkowski · 30 when first published

Novel

AIAI-generated summary:In Wrocław, two ageing gay men, Patrycja and Lukrecja, outdo each other with stories of the city's cruising grounds in the communist 1970s and 1980s; then the narrator heads for a nudist beach on the Baltic.

Nike 2005 · Shortlist

The Crime and the Silence: A Quest for the Truth of a Wartime Massacre

My z Jedwabnego

Anna Bikont · 50 when first published

Nonfiction · 417 pages · Historical, War, Politics

AIAI-generated summary:A reporter spends four years reconstructing the murder of the Jews of Jedwabne by their Polish neighbours in July 1941, and what happened to the memory of that crime over the following sixty years.

Nike 2005 · Shortlist

Travels with Herodotus

Podróże z Herodotem

Ryszard Kapuściński · 72 when first published

Nonfiction · 258 pages

AIAI-generated summary:A reporter looks back on decades of travel in Asia and Africa, admits how much he never understood, and sets his journeys beside those of the ancient historian Herodotus and the anecdotes of his Histories.

Nike 2004 · Shortlist

Moving Parts

Tryby

Magdalena Tulli · 48 when first published

Novel · 151 pages

AIAI-generated summary:A narrator who should be the master of his story, handing out roles like a god, turns into a sad, helpless clown, just one of the defenceless figures whose past is made up and whose future is ordered.

Nike 2003 · Shortlist

White and Red

Wojna polsko-ruska pod flagą biało-czerwoną

Dorota Masłowska · 19 when first published

Novel · 158 pages · Satire, Coming of age

AIAI-generated summary:Young people from a housing estate drift from party to party in a world of drugs, sex and muddled talk about Poles and Russians, told in a slang that is invented, broken apart and glued back together.

Nike 2003 · Shortlist

Chwila / Moment

Chwila

Wisława Szymborska · 79 when first published

Poetry · 44 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Poems that try to describe a single moment and marvel at it: a little girl pulling at a tablecloth, clouds that change before they can be described, people fleeing from other people.

Nike 2003 · Shortlist

Like Eating a Stone: Surviving the Past in Bosnia

Jakbyś kamień jadła

Wojciech Tochman · 33 when first published

Nonfiction · 103 pages · War

AIAI-generated summary:After the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, women who survived search for their missing men so that they can bury and mourn them, helped by a Polish forensic anthropologist.

Nike 2001 · Shortlist

Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland

Sąsiedzi. Historia zagłady żydowskiego miasteczka

Jan T. Gross · 53 when first published

Nonfiction · 157 pages · Historical, War

AIAI-generated summary:A historian's account of July 1941 in Jedwabne, a small town in north-eastern Poland, where Polish residents murdered their Jewish neighbours.

Nike 2000 · Shortlist

God's Horse and The Atheists' School

Szkoła bezbożników

Wilhelm Dichter · 64 when first published

Novel · 194 pages · Coming of age, Politics, Historical

AIAI-generated summary:In Poland at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s, a Jewish teenager who survived the war by a miracle falls under the spell of communism and Stalinism, until love gets in the way.