All prizes Poland
Poland · Since 1997 · For books in Polish
Awarded each October in Warsaw by a jury founded by Gazeta Wyborcza and the Agora Foundation to the best book of the previous year by a living Polish author, chosen from seven finalists. It is open to every genre: novels, poetry, drama, essays, reportage, biography and memoir.
The prize was first awarded in 1997 and was modelled on Britain's Booker Prize. Publishers submit books from the previous year. A nine-member jury names 20 nominees in May and seven finalists in September, and chooses the winner on the day of the ceremony. The award cannot be split or withheld. The winner receives 100,000 złoty and a statuette of the goddess Nike by the sculptor Gustaw Zemła. Gazeta Wyborcza readers also vote among the finalists for a separate readers' prize, which has matched the jury's choice only in some years. Winners include Czesław Miłosz, Tadeusz Różewicz and Mariusz Szczygieł. Wiesław Myśliwski and Olga Tokarczuk are the only authors to have won twice. Non-fiction often competes: Karol Modzelewski's autobiography won in 2014, and four of the 2021 finalists were reportage books. Critics have asked how a jury can fairly compare such different genres.
Showing 37 of 189 books. 152 aren’t in English yet: show all.
Nike 2024 · Shortlist
Łakome
Małgorzata Lebda · 38 when first published
Novel · 302 pages · Nature, Family
AI-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 · Winner
Nie ma
Mariusz Szczygieł · 52 when first published
Nonfiction · 331 pages
AI-generated summary:Pieces of reportage about absence: of people, of the past, of memory, of love. The author talks to a Czech poet, a Ukrainian soldier, a Polish accountant and an Israeli writer, and takes his father to Prague one last time.
Nike 2019 · Shortlist
Błoto słodsze niż miód. Głosy komunistycznej Albanii
Margo Rejmer · 33 when first published
Nonfiction · 339 pages · Politics, Historical
AI-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 · Winner
Rzeczy, których nie wyrzuciłem
Marcin Wicha · 45 when first published
Nonfiction · 182 pages · Family, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:After his mother's death, the narrator sorts through the books and things she left behind and pieces together a portrait of a strong, difficult, brave woman who lived by her own rules under communism and after.
Nike 2018 · Shortlist
Rejwach
Mikołaj Grynberg · 51 when first published
Short stories · 128 pages · Historical
AI-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
Dwanaście srok za ogon
Stanisław Łubieński · 33 when first published
Nonfiction · 202 pages · Nature
AI-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 · Winner
Nakarmić kamień
Bronka Nowicka · 41 when first published
Poetry · 53 pages
AI-generated summary:Prose poems that probe the essence of things in a world that has not yet acquired secondary meanings, exploring how people and objects are bound together and how the dead are kept alive in the things they leave.
Nike 2016 · Shortlist
1945. Wojna i pokój
Magdalena Grzebałkowska · 43 when first published
Nonfiction · 413 pages · Historical, War, Migration
AI-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 · Winner
Księgi Jakubowe
Olga Tokarczuk · 52 when first published
Novel · 903 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:In the eighteenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Jacob Frank proclaims himself the Messiah, and several thousand Jews from Podolia follow him into baptism and a long journey in search of a place of their own.
Also: International Booker 2022 shortlist
Nike 2015 · Shortlist
Sońka
Ignacy Karpowicz · 38 when first published
Novel · 204 pages · War, Love, Historical
AI-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
Guguły
Wioletta Greg · 40 when first published
Short stories · 115 pages · Coming of age, Autofiction
AI-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 2014 · Winner
Zajeździmy kobyłę historii. Wyznania poobijanego jeźdźca
Karol Modzelewski · 76 when first published
Nonfiction · 436 pages · Politics, Historical
AI-generated summary:The memoirs of a medieval historian and leading opponent of communist Poland: his family's story and his own, from the 1940s through the opposition of the 1960s, Solidarity and the transformation after 1989.
Nike 2013 · Shortlist
Przygody na bezludnej wyspie
Maciej Sieńczyk · 40 when first published
Novel · 143 pages
AI-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. Biografia
Andrzej Franaszek · 40 when first published
Nonfiction · 959 pages · Historical
AI-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
Miedzianka. Historia znikania
Filip Springer · 29 when first published
Nonfiction · Historical
AI-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 · Winner
Nasza klasa. Historia w XIV lekcjach
Tadeusz Słobodzianek · 54 when first published
Drama · 108 pages · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:A play in fourteen lessons about Polish and Jewish classmates from a prewar school in a small town, whose lives lead through growing hostility to a massacre modelled on Jedwabne and down to the present.
Nike 2010 · Shortlist
Nocni wędrowcy
Wojciech Jagielski · 49 when first published
Nonfiction · 329 pages · War
AI-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
Gesty
Ignacy Karpowicz · 32 when first published
Novel · 260 pages · Family
AI-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 2008 · Winner
Bieguni
Olga Tokarczuk · 45 when first published
Novel · 451 pages
AI-generated summary:Fragments and stories about travel and travellers across places and centuries, from airports and hotels to the Moscow metro and a holiday in Croatia during which a man's wife and son vanish.
Also: International Booker 2018 winner · National Book Award 2018 finalist · Warwick Prize 2018 shortlist
Nike 2007 · Winner
Traktat o łuskaniu fasoli
Wiesław Myśliwski · 74 when first published
Novel · 398 pages · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:A stranger from the city stops at a holiday resort by a reservoir to buy some beans, and the old caretaker of the empty summer houses starts to tell him the story of his life.
Nike 2007 · Shortlist
Moje pierwsze samobójstwo
Jerzy Pilch · 54 when first published
Short stories · 298 pages · Autofiction
AI-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
Skaza
Magdalena Tulli · 51 when first published
Novel · 177 pages
AI-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
Mariusz Szczygieł · 40 when first published
Nonfiction · 237 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-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
Kolonie
Tomasz Różycki · 36 when first published
Poetry · 84 pages
AI-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
Lubiewo
Michał Witkowski · 30 when first published
Novel
AI-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 · Winner
Jadąc do Babadag
Andrzej Stasiuk · 44 when first published
Nonfiction · 321 pages
AI-generated summary:Travelling by car, hitchhiking and by train through Romania, Moldova, Albania and the provinces of Hungary and Slovakia, the author seeks out the forgotten corners of Europe and the people who live there.
Nike 2005 · Shortlist
My z Jedwabnego
Anna Bikont · 50 when first published
Nonfiction · 417 pages · Historical, War, Politics
AI-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
Podróże z Herodotem
Ryszard Kapuściński · 72 when first published
Nonfiction · 258 pages
AI-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
Tryby
Magdalena Tulli · 48 when first published
Novel · 151 pages
AI-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
Wojna polsko-ruska pod flagą biało-czerwoną
Dorota Masłowska · 19 when first published
Novel · 158 pages · Satire, Coming of age
AI-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
Wisława Szymborska · 79 when first published
Poetry · 44 pages
AI-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
Jakbyś kamień jadła
Wojciech Tochman · 33 when first published
Nonfiction · 103 pages · War
AI-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 2002 · Winner
W ogrodzie pamięci
Joanna Olczak-Ronikier · 67 when first published
Nonfiction · 357 pages · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:The history of the author's family, assimilated Polish Jews and famous publishers, from a Viennese rabbi in the nineteenth century through the totalitarian upheavals of the twentieth.
Nike 2001 · Winner
Pod Mocnym Aniołem
Jerzy Pilch · 48 when first published
Novel · 263 pages
AI-generated summary:Juruś, a writer and an alcoholic, keeps coming back to Dr Granada's ward for delirious drinkers, between binges and hopeless love affairs, among fellow patients whose stories are funny and terrible at once.
Nike 2001 · Shortlist
Sąsiedzi. Historia zagłady żydowskiego miasteczka
Jan T. Gross · 53 when first published
Nonfiction · 157 pages · Historical, War
AI-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 · Winner
Matka odchodzi
Tadeusz Różewicz · 78 when first published
Poetry · 136 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems and prose memories of the poet's mother: her eyes, which watch her son all his life, her stay in hospital in 1957 and her death from cancer, together with family photographs and notes by his brother and by her.
Nike 2000 · Shortlist
Szkoła bezbożników
Wilhelm Dichter · 64 when first published
Novel · 194 pages · Coming of age, Politics, Historical
AI-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.