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.
Nike 2026 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Not the End, Not the Beginning: The Postwar Choices of Polish Jews”
Anna Bikont · 71 when first published
Nonfiction · 407 pages · Historical, Migration
AI-generated summary:Reportage on Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust and, in the first years after the war, had to decide whether to stay in the country where their families lay buried or leave it and start again.
Nike 2026 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Women Risen from the Dead”
Short stories · 162 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:In a nameless city suspended in time, a taxi driver, a rubbish collector, a hairdresser and a museum guard live ordinary lives, until something uncanny slips in through the cracks.
Nike 2026 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Snares for Light”
Justyna Kulikowska · 32 when first published
Poetry · 50 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems, at times dazzling like disco balls and at times blunt as a mosh pit on concrete, about entanglement and betrayal, and about the traumas and injustices passed down from one generation to the next.
Nike 2026 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Wisest: A Biography of Socrates”
Nonfiction · 527 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:A biography of Socrates that is also a portrait of ancient Athens: its politics, art and wars, its populism and polarisation, and the city that sentenced its wisest man to death.
Nike 2026 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Birthday”
Weronika Murek · 36 when first published
Novel · 252 pages
AI-generated summary:Jaga Babażyna, an ageing actress or perhaps a director staging a play of terror, cannot tell which role she plays in her own life, nor whether life is playing with her.
Nike 2026 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Only Fools Live to the End”
Zyta Rudzka · 61 when first published
Novel · 206 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Lida, a PE teacher, leaves the big city for a life on the margins with two men. An outsider who seeks pleasure and finds it, she does not watch the world; she collides with it.
Nike 2025 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Konrad Swinarski: A Hidden Biography”
Beata Guczalska · 61 when first published
Nonfiction · 794 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:A biography of the theatre director Konrad Swinarski (1929–1975) that tests his legend against the facts, from his German background and wartime past to his ties with the communist authorities and his tragic death.
Nike 2025 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Magic Wound”
Dorota Masłowska · 41 when first published
Novel · 155 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:Women falling apart, gym regulars, stylish city dwellers and teenagers who know their rights pass through luxury flats, a vegan wedding, a craft bakery and a hotel due for demolition, each driven by impossible desires.
Nike 2025 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“People from the Sky”
Ignacy Karpowicz · 48 when first published
Novel · 340 pages · Historical, Family
AI-generated summary:In 1905, in Bieniakonie south of Vilnius, Kora, one of eight children, longs for adventure and for her twin brother Franciszek, who has gone away to school and will become Poland's most famous pilot.
Nike 2025 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Look Down: On Collecting Things”
Nonfiction · 252 pages
AI-generated summary:An archaeologist and collector of old plastic, Bakelite and celluloid asks why ordinary objects come to matter so much, and what dolls, keys, shop signs and trinkets from her native Gdańsk reveal about the lives of ordinary people.
Nike 2025 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“August”
Paweł Sołtys · 40 when first published
Novel · 113 pages
AI-generated summary:In a hot Warsaw August, a melancholy narrator wanders the city's corners, outskirts and gateways, mixing his own memories with those of the city and its people, famous and ordinary.
Nike 2025 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Revels & Frolics”
Tomasz Różycki · 54 when first published
Poetry · 76 pages · War
AI-generated summary:A poet moved by images of the war in Ukraine asks what writing poems is for, in a collection drawing on Goethe, Mickiewicz and George Steiner.
Nike 2024 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Elementages (1&2)”
Andrzej Sosnowski · 64 when first published
Nonfiction · 107 pages · Autofiction
AI-generated summary:A poet who kept away from poetry so that memories would not invade his poems lets them into sentences that resemble prose instead: autobiographical fragments from childhood on.
Nike 2024 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“On Szewska Street: The Case of Stanisław Pyjas”
Cezary Łazarewicz · 57 when first published
Nonfiction · 414 pages · Politics, Historical, Crime
AI-generated summary:On 7 May 1977 the body of Stanisław Pyjas, a student active in Kraków's opposition and watched by the secret police, is found in a tenement on Szewska Street. The book reconstructs the investigations into his death.
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 2024 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Wolves”
Marzanna Bogumiła Kielar · 60 when first published
Poetry · 52 pages · Nature, War, Migration
AI-generated summary:Poems about uprooted times, when houses are lived in only briefly and other people's beds occupied: of farmsteads overgrown with birch, deportations and resettlements, migrating cranes and hungry wolves at the door.
Nike 2024 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Faith: An Autobiography”
Michał Witkowski · 48 when first published
Nonfiction · 496 pages · Autofiction, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:The first part of a novelist's autobiography: a childhood in communist Poland, a boy who believed in magic, God and everything else, a great tree in the courtyard at the centre of his world.
Nike 2024 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Masqueraders in Nothingness”
Piotr Paziński · 50 when first published
Nonfiction · 178 pages
AI-generated summary:An essay on Witold Wojtkiewicz, the Polish modernist painter who died young of heart disease and filled his fantastic scenes with childhood, theatre, madness and death.
Nike 2023 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Price: In Search of Jewish Children after the War”
Anna Bikont · 67 when first published
Nonfiction · 463 pages · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:In 1947 and 1948 Lejb Majzels travelled Poland in search of fifty-two Jewish children who had survived the Holocaust in Polish care. Seventy years later the author follows his notebooks to find them.
Nike 2023 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Gdynia Promised: City, Modernism, Modernisation 1920–1939”
Grzegorz Piątek · 42 when first published
Nonfiction · 431 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:The story of Gdynia, the port city built from scratch in interwar Poland, where the young state hoped to leave its divisions, backwardness and poverty behind and leap into the twentieth century.
Nike 2023 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Flicker: From the End of Greenland”
Ilona Wiśniewska · 41 when first published
Nonfiction · 253 pages · Nature
AI-generated summary:The author spends three months in Qaanaaq and Siorapaluk, the northernmost settlements of Greenland, among the Inughuit, polar Inuit who still live by the rules of nature and their hunting ancestors.
Nike 2023 · Shortlist
Mateusz Górniak · 26 when first published
Novel · 117 pages · Coming of age, Satire
AI-generated summary:Mati, a boy from a small town in Silesia, starts telling his story, and soon toasters, rubbish, cartoon characters and film clichés take over the telling.
Nike 2023 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Years of Practice”
Piotr Sommer · 74 when first published
Poetry · 71 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems about time and about the practice of writing them, found halfway between the small details of life and abstraction: a two-and-a-half-year-old named Lena, picking mulberries, walking the dog.
Nike 2023 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Crossing the Threshold, I Will Whistle”
Novel · 123 pages · Coming of age, Family
AI-generated summary:In the 1990s, a little girl with no name, pushed to the edges of her family's life and used as a pawn in its quarrels, tells of piano lessons, first communion, her drinking father and her two grandmothers.
Nike 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Melt Away”
Anna Cieplak · 33 when first published
Novel · 314 pages · Coming of age, Migration, Family
AI-generated summary:In 1999, in a miners' tenement in Ruda Śląska, four teenagers whose parents have gone to work in the West grow up with grandmothers, first loves and first drinks, dreaming of another life.
Nike 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Exile: 21 Scenes from the Life of Zygmunt Bauman”
Artur Domosławski · 54 when first published
Nonfiction · 906 pages · Politics, Historical
AI-generated summary:A biography of the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman in twenty-one scenes: a man who fled nationalism all his life, was driven out of Poland and never felt at home where he was taken in.
Nike 2022 · Shortlist
Edward Pasewicz · 50 when first published
Novel · 590 pages · Historical, Crime, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Decades after the war in Międzyrzecz, once German Meseritz, teenage Patryk Werhunt finds a neighbour's body floating in the river Obra, and suspicion falls on him.
Nike 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Them: Homosexuals during the Second World War”
Joanna Ostrowska · 38 when first published
Nonfiction · 362 pages · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:A history of men persecuted under Paragraph 175, the German law against homosexuality, in occupied Poland and the Reich: imprisoned in Polish towns, sent to concentration camps, and later forgotten.
Nike 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Boorishness”
Kacper Pobłocki · 41 when first published
Nonfiction · 382 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:An anthropologist retells the history of Poland's nobles' republic from the side of its serfs, whose unpaid labour under constant threat of the whip he calls by its name: slavery.
Nike 2022 · Shortlist
Maciej Płaza · 45 when first published
Novel · 316 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:In a Hasidic shtetl in Podolia at the start of the twentieth century, the golem of Jewish legend, a man-shaped being without a soul, comes to life among kabbalists and messianic hopes.
Nike 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Layla Means Night”
Aleksandra Lipczak · 39 when first published
Nonfiction · 270 pages · Historical, Migration
AI-generated summary:Between reportage and essay, a journey through Andalusia asks what remains of Al-Andalus, where Jews, Muslims and Christians lived together for eight centuries, and how its present-day inhabitants live with that legacy.
Nike 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Best City in the World: Warsaw in Reconstruction, 1944–1949”
Grzegorz Piątek · 40 when first published
Nonfiction · 530 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:After the defeat of the 1944 uprising, Warsaw is a sea of rubble. The book follows the architects of the Capital Reconstruction Office, who set out to build an ideal modern city on the ruins.
Nike 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Double Pendulum”
Jacek Podsiadło · 56 when first published
Poetry · 52 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems that look back: on books read long ago, on the poet's own past and on history, from antiquity to the Holocaust and vanished synagogues, and on friends such as Julia Hartwig and Tomasz Pułka.
Nike 2021 · Shortlist
Kasper Bajon · 37 when first published
Nonfiction · 299 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:The author settles on Fuerteventura, in the Canary Islands, and digs into its history: the vanished Guanches, conquistadors and pirates, the exiled poet Miguel de Unamuno, a German host to Nazis and a Francoist penal colony for gay men.
Nike 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Otherworlds: Stories of Not Passing Away”
Krzysztof Fedorowicz · 50 when first published
Short stories · 238 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:Loosely linked stories about wine and its makers, set over several centuries, from the Thirty Years' War to the recent pandemic, on the stretch of land where the Oder turns west.
Nike 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Maidens from The Wedding”
Monika Śliwińska · 42 when first published
Nonfiction · 659 pages · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:The lives of Anna, Jadwiga and Maria Mikołajczyk, peasant daughters from Bronowice near Kraków who grew up in a thatched cottage and were immortalised in Wyspiański's play The Wedding.
Nike 2020 · Shortlist
Agnieszka Dauksza · 31 when first published
Nonfiction · 621 pages
AI-generated summary:A biography of Maria Jarema, the painter and sculptor from Stary Sambor who came to Kraków between the wars, helped found the Kraków Group and the Cricot theatre, and kept painting after she learned she was ill.
Nike 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“I Stepped on a Black Cat by Accident”
Filip Zawada · 44 when first published
Novel · 265 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:A boy whom everyone calls a foundling tries to make sense of a world of grown-ups busy with nonsense, nuns he can never figure out, a shopkeeper who suddenly has a baby and a cat called Satan that has vanished.
Nike 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The 27 Deaths of Toby Obed”
Joanna Gierak-Onoszko · 39 when first published
Nonfiction · Historical
AI-generated summary:Reportage from Canada about the residential schools that took Indigenous children from their families, and about the people who went through them and call themselves not graduates but survivors.
Nike 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Empty Forest”
Monika Sznajderman · 60 when first published
Nonfiction · 239 pages · Historical, Nature
AI-generated summary:Living in Wołowiec, a village in the Beskid mountains, the author asks how a handful of people can fill the place of the eight hundred who once lived there and were swept away by history.
Nike 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Washing Pits: Seekers of Jewish Gold”
Paweł Piotr Reszka · 42 when first published
Nonfiction · 237 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:For years after the war, villagers near the former death camps of Sobibór and Bełżec dug through the mass graves for 'Jewish gold'. A reporter talks to them and their descendants about what they did.
Nike 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“When Will War Break Out? 1938: A Study of a Crisis”
Piotr M. Majewski · 47 when first published
Nonfiction · 572 pages · Politics, Historical
AI-generated summary:A study of the European crisis of 1938: the intrigues, propaganda shows, intelligence battles and press campaigns through which Europe, in the name of saving peace, moved a long step towards war.
Nike 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Ota Pavel: Beneath the Surface”
Aleksander Kaczorowski · 49 when first published
Nonfiction · 325 pages
AI-generated summary:A life of Ota Pavel, the Czech sports reporter and writer: son of a Jewish father, marked by the Holocaust, a committed communist after the war, and a perfectionist whose mental illness shadowed his writing.
Nike 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“A Polish Tourist in the USSR”
Juliusz Strachota · 39 when first published
Novel · 221 pages
AI-generated summary:Just out of a psychiatric hospital, a man finds the guidebook to the Soviet Union he pored over as a child and sets off for the places in it.
Nike 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Primitive: A National Epic”
Marcin Kołodziejczyk · 45 when first published
Novel · 492 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:A satirical portrait of today's Poland seen from the back streets of Praga, Warsaw's poorer east bank, told in the mangled, high-flown language of the people who live there.
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 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Kingdom”
Szczepan Twardoch · 39 when first published
Novel · 348 pages · War, Historical
AI-generated summary:In the ruins of Warsaw after the 1944 uprising, Ryfka hides and nurses Jakub Szapiro, once the terror of the city's underworld, while his son Dawid, who survived deportation, looks back on his father.
Nike 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“A Brief Exchange of Fire”
Zyta Rudzka · 54 when first published
Novel · 198 pages · Love, Family
AI-generated summary:When a young man at a bus stop asks her for a light, Roma Dąbrowska, an ageing poet, realises that her erotic life is over and begins to take stock of her loves.
Nike 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Sendler: In Hiding”
Anna Bikont · 63 when first published
Nonfiction · 477 pages · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:A biography of Irena Sendler, the Polish woman who helped save Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto, forgotten for decades until a play by American schoolgirls made her famous in 2001.
Nike 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Random Access Memory”
Ewa Lipska · 72 when first published
Poetry · 43 pages
AI-generated summary:More than twenty poems whose titles borrow from technology but whose subject is people: we who eat love and spit out the pips, see the boarding-time light blink, and watch the world break down.
Nike 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Stanzas”
Jerzy Kronhold · 71 when first published
Poetry · 59 pages
AI-generated summary:Free, wide-ranging poems held together by rhythm and melody, with echoes of the Polish poetic tradition, a Horatian tone that recalls Kochanowski and just enough baroque to delight in a conceit.
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 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Microtics”
Paweł Sołtys · 33 when first published
Short stories · 141 pages
AI-generated summary:Short stories set in a city on the right bank of a river, where Professor Kruk explains in the Stokrotka bar how to knock someone out with a volume of Iwaszkiewicz and Modern Talking still plays.
Nike 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Other Hand”
Wojciech Bonowicz · 50 when first published
Poetry · 47 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems marking the poet's fiftieth birthday, some recording social scenes in the manner of the American Objectivists, others inspired by the Czech surrealists, and asking about the other hand of every poet, the one that does not write.
Nike 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Sleep Paralysis”
Genowefa Jakubowska-Fijałkowska · 70 when first published
Poetry · 57 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems by a speaker condemned to old age who refuses it, still young and combative, writing sharply and without euphemism about the body, sex, loneliness and death.
Nike 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Breguet's Hair”
Jacek Podsiadło · 52 when first published
Poetry · 31 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems, among them a wry list of the conventions of old Polish films, with directors picked at random, scripts from the moon, young actors and murders in Zakopane.
Nike 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Forest Gives No Warning”
Krzysztof Środa · 57 when first published
Nonfiction · 106 pages · War
AI-generated summary:Chechnya, ploughed up by a cruel war, and Morocco, a paradise for European tourists, become parts of one story about the nature of the world, where brutality and gentleness, fear and intoxication mingle.
Nike 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Pepper Forgers: A Family History”
Monika Sznajderman · 57 when first published
Nonfiction · 280 pages · Family, Historical, War
AI-generated summary:An anthropologist reconstructs the lives of her two families, her father's Jewish relatives, most of them killed in the Holocaust, and her mother's Polish landed family, whose histories ran in parallel for centuries and never met.
Nike 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Heart”
Radka Franczak · 39 when first published
Novel · 302 pages · Migration, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:A young Polish woman goes with her boyfriend to Switzerland to see the world and earn money, and ends up as a helper in a crumbling mansion on Lake Geneva, caring for the ageing Shirley and her daughter.
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 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Scamp”
Maciej Płaza · 39 when first published
Short stories · 348 pages · Coming of age, Family
AI-generated summary:In the 1980s, by the Vistula near Sandomierz, a boy the village calls a good-for-nothing lives with his father, an orchard keeper, tinkerer and atheist, and his mother, a living saint, and feels his life beginning.
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 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Which Way to Forever”
Piotr Matywiecki · 72 when first published
Poetry · 116 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems of history and existence, drawing on the poet's own life, from his birth amid the fires of war to a brush with death, and testing every word for emptiness.
Nike 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“In the Ice of Provence: Bunin in Exile”
Renata Lis · 45 when first published
Nonfiction · 430 pages · Historical, Love, War
AI-generated summary:In the early 1940s, as the Germans occupy France, the Russian writer Ivan Bunin watches from Grasse on the Riviera, having lost the old Russia, a great love and the strength his success once gave him.
Nike 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Growing Southern Plants by the Michurin Method”
Weronika Murek · 26 when first published
Short stories · 139 pages · Speculative, Satire
AI-generated summary:Stories balanced between waking and dreaming, life and death: a chestnut vendor and a cosmonaut, General Sikorski's coffin, a half-deaf Virgin Mary knitting socks for Jesus by the light of the television.
Nike 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Tattoo with a Trident”
Ziemowit Szczerek · 37 when first published
Nonfiction · 318 pages · Politics, War
AI-generated summary:Travels through Ukraine as a state takes shape, sometimes post-apocalyptic, sometimes roaring with enthusiasm, around the Maidan and the war in Donbas, trying to understand its 'pro-Western' and 'pro-Eastern' sides.
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
Title translated by AI:“Mother Makryna”
Jacek Dehnel · 34 when first published
Novel · 398 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:The monologue of Makryna Mieczysławska, a nineteenth-century impostor who claimed to be the abbess of a Uniate convent tortured by the Russians, won fame across Europe and enthralled the Polish Romantics.
Nike 2015 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Through Sleep”
Jacek Podsiadło · 50 when first published
Poetry · 31 pages
AI-generated summary:A short collection of poems made together with the graphic artist Małgorzata Rybicka, whose design and unusual layout carry the poems' meanings.
Nike 2015 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Noise”
Magdalena Tulli · 59 when first published
Novel · 188 pages · Autofiction, Family
AI-generated summary:A woman who has always felt a stranger tries to break through that isolation and reach an understanding with her mother, with whom she has always had a difficult bond.
Nike 2015 · Shortlist
Szczepan Twardoch · 35 when first published
Novel · 394 pages · Family, Historical, War
AI-generated summary:Drach sees the past and knows the future: little Josef watching a pig slaughter in Silesia in 1906, and Nikodem, an architect leaving his wife for another woman a century later, linked by the fates of two families.
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 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Little Heaven”
Brygida Helbig · 50 when first published
Novel · 311 pages · Family, Historical, Migration
AI-generated summary:In Berlin, Marzena unravels the tangled history of her Polish-German family, from a servant who gives birth in an attic in the prewar borderlands and dies, to a German mother of three resettled by Hitler and fleeing the Red Army.
Nike 2014 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Fishbones”
Ignacy Karpowicz · 37 when first published
Novel · 468 pages · Love, Satire
AI-generated summary:The cat Bury dies, and that is only the start: Maja accuses Szymon of an affair, Ninel, still Kuba to her mother, falls for Norbert, who has long loved Krzyś, whose relationship with Andrzej is in doubt.
Nike 2014 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Many Demons”
Jerzy Pilch · 61 when first published
Novel · 478 pages · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:In the 1950s, in a small Lutheran town in Cieszyn Silesia, the pastor's daughter Jula arrives with a Catholic fiancé, while her sister Ola has mysteriously vanished.
Nike 2014 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“One”
Marcin Świetlicki · 52 when first published
Poetry · 92 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Poems of a new love and a new beginning, written with rare exclamation marks and a boyish freedom, yet shadowed from first page to last by death, fear and an indifferent God.
Nike 2014 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Night Animals”
Patrycja Pustkowiak · 32 when first published
Novel · 222 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:Tamara Mortus, a young woman both fallen and proud, sets out through Warsaw's night, its malls, clubs and casinos, wanting to try everything: alcohol, drugs, pornography, the very edge of experience.
Nike 2014 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Here It Comes”
Szymon Słomczyński · 25 when first published
Poetry · 59 pages
AI-generated summary:A dense, many-voiced debut collection full of roles, masks, flirtation and evasion, about casual sex, alcoholism, pathologies and even the Smolensk air crash, painfully honest behind its disguises.
Nike 2013 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Night of the Living Jews”
Igor Ostachowicz · 44 when first published
Novel · 252 pages · Speculative, Historical
AI-generated summary:A jaded thirty-something in present-day Warsaw drifts from woman to woman and bar to bar, until a series of strange signs leads him to a passage into the world where the tragedy of Warsaw's Jews unfolded.
Nike 2013 · Shortlist
Justyna Bargielska · 35 when first published
Poetry · 35 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems full of the body and of eroticism, but also of death and metaphysical unease, turning constantly between the living and the dead, the natural and the conventional.
Nike 2013 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Look at Me, Klara!”
Kaja Malanowska · 38 when first published
Novel · 275 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:As a girl, Klara could not stop trailing after her magnetic classmate Agata. Years later her husband meets another woman, and Klara finds the woman's blog and falls under its spell.
Nike 2013 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Little Marsh”
Katarzyna Surmiak-Domańska · 45 when first published
Nonfiction · 139 pages · Family, Crime
AI-generated summary:A woman who published a memoir about being abused for years by her father, with her mother's silent consent, is seen through the eyes of those around her: husband, neighbours, mother-in-law, doctor.
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 2013 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Morphine”
Szczepan Twardoch · 33 when first published
Novel · 578 pages · War, Historical
AI-generated summary:Warsaw, 1939. Konstanty Willemann, son of a German aristocrat and a Polonised Silesian mother, a cynic, a womaniser and a bad husband, fights reluctantly in September and joins the underground against his will.
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
Title translated by AI:“Name and Mark”
Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki · 49 when first published
Poetry · 56 pages · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:Poems that return to the poet's childhood village and its family secrets: a father who became a Polish nationalist while speaking a mix of Polish and Ukrainian, and maternal relatives in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.
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 2012 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“A Bat in the Temple: A Biography of Jerzy Nowosielski”
Krystyna Czerni · 54 when first published
Nonfiction · 444 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:A biography of the painter Jerzy Nowosielski, religious artist and painter of bold nudes, torn between a Catholic mother and a Greek Catholic father, with his Ukrainian roots, his drinking and his loves.
Nike 2012 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Italian Stilettos”
Magdalena Tulli · 56 when first published
Novel · 143 pages · Autofiction, Family
AI-generated summary:A nameless woman with an Italian father lives between two worlds, beautiful Milan and grey Warsaw, and between a mother hardened by a concentration camp and her own life damaged by that silence.
Nike 2012 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Turtle's House: Zanzibar”
Małgorzata Szejnert · 75 when first published
Nonfiction · 378 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:The history of Zanzibar from Sultan Said, who made the island the centre of a slave-trading empire in the nineteenth century, to today's tourist resort, told through the lives of the people and houses there.
Nike 2011 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“A Diary Written Afterwards”
Andrzej Stasiuk · 50 when first published
Nonfiction · 164 pages
AI-generated summary:Travelling home from the Balkans through Banja Luka, Jajce and Travnik, the author thinks of Poland, lying between East and West, and promises to describe it kilometre by kilometre, parish by parish.
Nike 2011 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Balladinas and Romances”
Ignacy Karpowicz · 34 when first published
Novel · 574 pages · Satire, Speculative, Love
AI-generated summary:Things on Earth are going badly, coffee is running out and irons keep vanishing, so the old gods, from Aphrodite and Osiris to Jesus and Lucifer, come down to set things right, and they choose Poland.
Nike 2011 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Cloudalia”
Joanna Bator · 42 when first published
Novel · 501 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:After a car accident, Dominika Chmura wakes in a hospital in Munich, the turning point that sends her travelling in search of identity, freedom and Chmurdalia, an Arcadia where people live in perfect community.
Nike 2011 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Stillborns”
Justyna Bargielska · 33 when first published
Short stories · 89 pages
AI-generated summary:Very short pieces around pregnancy, childbirth and miscarriage, told without pathos, mixing everyday life with fantasy, dreams, the grotesque and black humour.
Nike 2011 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Diary, Volume 1: 1962–1969”
Sławomir Mrożek · 80 when first published
Nonfiction · 732 pages
AI-generated summary:The first volume of a playwright's diary, kept from 1962 to 1969, the years after he left Poland: private notes, sharp observation of his times and a laboratory where ideas and sentences take shape.
Nike 2011 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Back of the Eye: Essays on Photography”
Wojciech Nowicki · 42 when first published
Nonfiction · 179 pages
AI-generated summary:Essays that read photographs, iconic and intimate, as silent, motionless fragments of the past, uncovering the stories hidden behind a pose, a setting or a face.
Nike 2010 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Test Card”
Jacek Dehnel · 29 when first published
Poetry · 63 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems that move from the sacred world of childhood to the profane one of adulthood, from a boy in a tartan cap in the 1980s to a gay website, Marlene Dietrich and skaters outside Saint-Denis.
Nike 2010 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Death of a Czech Dog”
Janusz Rudnicki · 53 when first published
Short stories · 204 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:Darkly comic stories mixing scraps of autobiography, newspaper items and mini-biographies: a dog walker who ends up eating his charge, the author arriving at a Berlin screening of Katyń in pyjamas and slippers, Andersen and Alma Mahler.
Nike 2010 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Clear Unclear”
Julia Hartwig · 88 when first published
Poetry · 58 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems of dreams, of artists from William Carlos Williams to Rossini, of friends remembered, of suffering in people and nature, and of the clear unclarity of poetry itself.
Nike 2010 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Jerzy Giedroyc: To Poland from a Dream”
Magdalena Grochowska · 59 when first published
Nonfiction · 685 pages · Historical, Politics, Migration
AI-generated summary:A biography of Jerzy Giedroyc, who founded and ran Kultura, the Polish émigré monthly in Paris, and of the writers around him, from the interwar years into the twenty-first century.
Nike 2010 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Days and Nights”
Piotr Sommer · 61 when first published
Poetry · 85 pages
AI-generated summary:Pointedly private poems born from the concrete stuff of life: broken moments, meetings and partings, family and friends, conversations that never quite connect, and memories that are accidental and useless.
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
Title translated by AI:“The Flytrap Factory”
Andrzej Bart · 57 when first published
Novel · 275 pages · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:A Polish writer is paid by the devil to go to his home town of Łódź and attend the trial of Chaim Rumkowski, head of the Jewish council of the Łódź ghetto during the war.
Nike 2009 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Tiramisu Queen”
Bohdan Sławiński · 31 when first published
Novel · 188 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Piotr, a sensitive young man from the provinces, moves to Warsaw, takes up doctoral studies and falls for Julia, an older, married radio executive, while memories of a humiliating childhood keep returning.
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 2009 · Shortlist
Inga Iwasiów · 45 when first published
Novel · 349 pages · Historical, Migration
AI-generated summary:In Szczecin after the war, people uprooted by shifting borders try to start again, and their paths cross at a milk bar called Bambino; only Ula, born Ulrike to a German family, has always lived there.
Nike 2009 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Turul Goulash”
Krzysztof Varga · 40 when first published
Nonfiction · 185 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:Essays on Hungary by a Polish writer with a Hungarian father: its myths and history, Budapest's streets and taverns, and a nation's nostalgia for a greatness that was often an illusion.
Nike 2009 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Ostrogski Palace”
Tomasz Piątek · 34 when first published
Novel · 307 pages · Autofiction
AI-generated summary:A Warsaw advertising copywriter and recovering heroin addict who still lives with his parents wanders the city in search of thrills and finds secret underground passages beneath the Ostrogski Palace.
Nike 2008 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Death's Assistant”
Bronisław Świderski · 61 when first published
Novel · 504 pages · Autofiction, Migration, Politics
AI-generated summary:A Polish intellectual who has lived in Copenhagen for thirty-six years loses his post over an article on Kierkegaard's antisemitism, and the job centre sends him to sit with a dying old man in a hospice.
Nike 2008 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Terrazzo Tombstone”
Krzysztof Varga · 39 when first published
Novel · 354 pages · Satire, Speculative, Family
AI-generated summary:Far in the future, after the catastrophe of the 2070s, a narrator who works in the funeral-and-entertainment business looks at an old holiday photo of his grandparents from 2005 and recalls their marriage.
Nike 2008 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Black Garden”
Małgorzata Szejnert · 71 when first published
Nonfiction · 547 pages · Historical, Family
AI-generated summary:The history of Giszowiec, a miners' estate built in Upper Silesia in 1905 by the Giesche mining company, and of the families who lived there through a century of wars, uprisings and changes of state.
Nike 2008 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Tuwim's Face”
Piotr Matywiecki · 64 when first published
Nonfiction · 770 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:A biography of the poet Julian Tuwim, from a poor Jewish youth in Łódź through the Skamander group in Warsaw and wartime exile in America to the disappointments of postwar Poland.
Nike 2008 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“In Passing”
Urszula Kozioł · 76 when first published
Poetry · 108 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems of farewell to the world, in which death appears not as drama but as a slow growing apart from everyday things, and as astonishment that one will never see New York again.
Nike 2008 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Head Circumference”
Włodzimierz Nowak · 49 when first published
Nonfiction · 257 pages · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:Reportage about Poles and Germans and their shared history: two Polish sisters taken for the Lebensborn programme, a Belgian sent to crush the Warsaw Uprising, and German women who killed their children as the Red Army approached.
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
Title translated by AI:“Music of the Middle”
Marcin Świetlicki · 45 when first published
Poetry · 57 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems by a poet who reappears after a time of 'disintegration', no longer living where he lived or with whom he lived, and watches his former self with sarcasm.
Nike 2007 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Uncanny Slavdom”
Maria Janion · 80 when first published
Nonfiction · 357 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:A study of Polish myths and fantasies: the attempts of the Romantics to recover a pagan Slavic past, the messianic Catholicism of the partitions, and how these shaped Polish attitudes to Russia and to strangers.
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
Title translated by AI:“The Condition”
Eustachy Rylski · 61 when first published
Novel · 253 pages · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:In late 1812, during the retreat of Napoleon's Grand Army, a legendary cavalry captain and a plain staff lieutenant who dislike each other must cross the frozen expanse of Russia together to reach the captain's home.
Nike 2006 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Portage”
Mariusz Wilk · 50 when first published
Nonfiction · 252 pages · Historical, Nature
AI-generated summary:Notes from the far north of Russia by a writer who has lived for years on the Solovetsky Islands, where the history of Russian monasticism meets that of the labour camps, and a voyage along the White Sea Canal.
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 2006 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“This Cloud Returns”
Piotr Matywiecki · 62 when first published
Poetry · 89 pages
AI-generated summary:City poems in which every walk through Warsaw, past lifts, intercoms, metro lines and rotting courtyards, becomes a walk into memory, in a city the poet loves because it tolerates his existence.
Nike 2006 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Colon”
Wisława Szymborska · 82 when first published
Poetry · 41 pages
AI-generated summary:Twenty-seven poems about chance and absence, about questions left unanswered between people, about old age and a hidden world that shows itself only in everyday trifles.
Nike 2006 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“All the Languages of the World”
Zbigniew Mentzel · 54 when first published
Novel · 171 pages · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:On a single day in Warsaw, ten years after the fall of communism, a man drives his old father to a farewell party at the hospital where he worked all his life, and remembers growing up in the 1950s and 1960s.
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
Title translated by AI:“All Covered in Sand”
Dariusz Suska · 36 when first published
Poetry · 52 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Poems written as talk with the poet's small daughter, in a world bounded by a swing, a bicycle and a sandbox, where dead ladybirds and tadpoles raise the question of mortality.
Nike 2005 · Shortlist
Ewa Kuryluk · 58 when first published
Novel · 246 pages · Autofiction, Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:A girl grows up in a family in postwar Warsaw and Vienna, where her father is a diplomat and minister, while her mother, a Holocaust survivor, keeps her Jewish origins hidden and her fear alive.
Nike 2005 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“An Exceptionally Long Line”
Hanna Krall · 69 when first published
Nonfiction · 131 pages · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:The residents of a four-hundred-year-old house in Lublin's Old Town, most of them Jewish, among them the family of Dr Marek Arnsztajn, his mother the poet Franciszka Arnsztajnowa and their friend the poet Józef Czechowicz.
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 2005 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Exit”
Tadeusz Różewicz · 83 when first published
Poetry · 114 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems by an old poet who sits at a rickety table in his poor stall, ashamed, while supermarkets fill with bestsellers, and who writes that words have been used up, yet still offers some that can be laid on a wound.
Nike 2004 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Sawmill”
Daniel Odija · 29 when first published
Novel · 127 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:In a poor village where the state farm has closed, Józef Myśliwski gets rich breeding foxes, then strips the forests and opens a sawmill, until debts close in and he decides to burn it for the insurance.
Nike 2004 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“I”
Ewa Lipska · 58 when first published
Poetry · 53 pages
AI-generated summary:Spare, rough poems without ornament, in which the real, concrete world leads to broader thoughts about love, dialogue, the cruelty of time and the consequences of modern life.
Nike 2004 · Shortlist
Henryk Waniek · 61 when first published
Novel · 359 pages · Historical, Migration
AI-generated summary:Starting from prewar photographs of young Germans in Silesia, the novel imagines the lives of two of them, Brigitte Kopietz and Paul Scholz, in a land that is about to disappear.
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 2004 · Shortlist
Mieczysław Porębski · 82 when first published
Nonfiction · 293 pages
AI-generated summary:An art historian's essays, written over almost half a century, about the painter Jerzy Nowosielski, his friend of sixty years, joining the personal and the artistic into one monograph.
Nike 2004 · Shortlist
Ryszard Przybylski · 75 when first published
Nonfiction · 201 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:A historical essay about the lyceum founded in 1805 in Krzemieniec, in the former eastern lands of Poland, and about how its founders made use of an ambiguous political situation under Russian rule.
Nike 2003 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Russia, Catholicism and the Polish Question”
Andrzej Walicki · 72 when first published
Nonfiction · 462 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:A history of how Catholicism shaped Russian thinkers of the nineteenth century, some of whom blamed Rome, and 'Jesuit Poland' with it, for breaking the unity of Christianity.
Nike 2003 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Orpheus and Eurydice”
Czesław Miłosz · 91 when first published
Poetry · 50 pages
AI-generated summary:A single long poem, a helpless farewell to the poet's late wife, in which Orpheus descends to Hades in search of Eurydice in a world that is real and contemporary.
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
Title translated by AI:“Flashes”
Julia Hartwig · 81 when first published
Poetry · 97 pages
AI-generated summary:Short pieces between poetry and prose: sudden thoughts, memories, quotations, a few rhythmic lines or two sentences read by chance in a newspaper, traces of the mind's everyday bustle.
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 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“There Is No Answer”
Julia Hartwig · 80 when first published
Poetry · 96 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems in which a truth about life hidden in darkness, one we do not understand or do not wish to ask about, meets the need to be understood and to find a response.
Nike 2002 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Labyrinth”
Krystian Lupa · 58 when first published
Nonfiction · 316 pages
AI-generated summary:A theatre director's intimate diary from 1990 to 2000, shaped as a story about the small cosmos of childhood, about early and late experiences of the body and sex, about death, failed friendship and travel.
Nike 2002 · Shortlist
Krzysztof Varga · 33 when first published
Novel · 110 pages
AI-generated summary:At a cemetery, carrying the coffin of his friend, the drummer in his band, a rock musician delivers a tragicomic monologue about friendship, music, the world today, passing time and death.
Nike 2002 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Open until Further Notice”
Marcin Świetlicki · 40 when first published
Poetry · 56 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems that list, with alphabetical precision, the stations of passing away, balanced between satire and deadly seriousness: time, pain, death and emptiness.
Nike 2002 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Playing on Many Drums”
Olga Tokarczuk · 39 when first published
Short stories · 342 pages
AI-generated summary:A large collection of stories in which, behind the curtain of everyday life, something always breaks the order of things and pulls people out of their routine.
Nike 2002 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Professor's Knife”
Tadeusz Różewicz · 80 when first published
Poetry · 40 pages · War
AI-generated summary:Poems centred on a long title poem about the Holocaust, memory and friendship, which begins with a small knife that the poet's friend, the art historian Mieczysław Porębski, made from a barrel hoop in Auschwitz.
Nike 2001 · Shortlist
Artur Daniel Liskowacki · 44 when first published
Novel · 229 pages · Historical, Migration
AI-generated summary:Szczecin just after the war, when the Soviets have not yet decided whether to leave the city to Poland or give it to East Germany: the stories of its last German inhabitants, linked by an orphan who can fly and refuses to grow up.
Nike 2001 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Memorbuch: A Book of Remembrance”
Henryk Grynberg · 64 when first published
Novel · 356 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:The life of Adam Bromberg, told as if in his own words: a communist from a wealthy Jewish family, political prisoner, Soviet labour-camp inmate, front-line officer, renowned publisher, and finally a refugee.
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 2001 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Pumpkin Carriage”
Kinga Dunin · 46 when first published
Nonfiction · 170 pages · Politics
AI-generated summary:Essays, reviews and columns on postmodern culture and literature, feminism and exclusion, framed by the tale of Cinderella, whom Prince DyDo, the Dominant Discourse of Polish literature, will not let into the ball.
Nike 2001 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Dusks and Mornings”
Piotr Szewc · 39 when first published
Novel · 143 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:One day in prewar Zamość, a small town of many cultures, seen by a little boy and by a stork circling overhead, in a world where things resemble people and the river talks to itself.
Nike 2001 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Stairs Don't Burn”
Wojciech Tochman · 31 when first published
Nonfiction · 209 pages
AI-generated summary:Eleven true stories from Poland at the end of the 1990s about tangled lives, love and sacrifice, among them an adopted man who, after thirty years, meets the twin brother he never knew he had.
Nike 2000 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Thirst”
Adam Zagajewski · 54 when first published
Poetry · 82 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems that long for great desires in a world where most needs can be met at once, for a price: a calm, comfortable, dull world of sated people, set against the language of a great dream.
Nike 2000 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Insatiable Things”
Andrzej Czcibor-Piotrowski · 68 when first published
Novel · 242 pages · Autofiction, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Notes from memory grow into a story that sails back almost sixty years to a childhood, finding again the narrator and those close to him, friends and strangers, and the wonders, fears and hopes of those years.
Nike 2000 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“An Obscure Sign, a Half-Alive Tale”
Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz · 64 when first published
Poetry · 61 pages · Nature
AI-generated summary:Poems in which the poet looks at his own garden in Milanówek as a baroque theatre of passing and death, in sing-song rhymes where sparrows, herbs and pecked apples stand with him before nothingness.
Nike 2000 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Body, Dress, Desire”
Krystyna Kłosińska · 47 when first published
Nonfiction · 327 pages
AI-generated summary:A feminist rereading of the novelist and playwright Gabriela Zapolska, which finds her strikingly modern and shows a culture still caught in the same stereotypes about women, their writing, their sexuality and their lineage.
Nike 2000 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Unbridled Horse: An Essay on Juliusz Słowacki's Thought”
Ryszard Przybylski · 71 when first published
Nonfiction · 215 pages
AI-generated summary:An essay on the thought of the Romantic poet Juliusz Słowacki, who took his ideas beyond Christianity, roamed through spiritual traditions from the Orphics to the Buddhists, rejected institutional religion and waited for a voice from beyond.
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.