Born in 1977, Grzegorz Kopaczewski is a prose-writer who made his debut with the novel Global Nation. A Scrapbook of Pop Culture (2004), and then published another novel Foundry (2007).  He lives in Chorzów.

With his debut nove, Kopaczewski became one of the first Polish prose-writers to document the experience of young Polish economic emigrants at the start of the 21st century. The action of Global Nation takes place in London, in a milieu of young people from all over the world, who come to England in search of work, money and attractions. Kopaczewski shows cosmopolitans, so-to-speak citizens of the world, who travel freely all around the globe in search of money and interesting acquaintances, or to run away from the stifling atmosphere of their home countries. But this is also a tale of an increasingly globalized culture and world, in which differences are starting to blur, which makes exploration boring and pointless.
In his subsequent novel, Foundry, Kopaczewski abandoned the novel of manners in favor of something resembling a grotesque utopia novel. In a post-industrial landscape once belonging to the Katowice Baildon foundry, a self-sufficient colony of artists and businessmen is created at the initiative of sociologists, as a sort of laboratory for the society of the future. Its residents, free from violence, unemployment and hard manual labor, are at liberty to develop their passions and realize themselves in full. We encounter the past, present and grim future of the titular Foundry from the point of view of a young sociology Ph.D., who is writing his thesis on the phenomenon of the site’s revitalization. I have mentioned that the future here is grim: as is often the case with utopias, the growing isolationism of the Foundry and the exhaustion of the formulae it was founded on ultimately lead to catastrophe.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Global nation. Obrazki z czasów popkultury, Wydawnictwo Czarne, Wołowiec 2004.
• Huta, Wydawnictwo Czarne, Wołowiec 2007.