Magdalena Parys (b. 1971 in Gdańsk) is a Polish-German writer, author of reportage and columnist. In 1984 her family emigrated to Berlin, where she has lived ever since. Following Germany’s reunification in 1990 she studied Polish philology and education at the Humboldt University in Berlin.  

She made her literary debut in 2001 in the literary journal Pogranicze, where her poems, short stories, essays and reviews were published. In 2011 her first novel, Tunel (“The Tunnel”), appeared (the first volume in her Berlin Trilogy, though in one of her interviews she admitted that to begin with she had not been planning to write a three-volume epic), and was enthusiastically received by the Polish critics, who acclaimed it as one of the most significant debuts of that year. As a result, Tunel represented Poland at the European Debut Festival in Kiel and in Berlin, and was reissued several times.

Tunel can be seen as a novel that’s strongly influenced by reportage, yet its portrait of Berlin (in the period following the Second World War), of the Cold War years, the city’s division and the Berlin Wall are merely a pretext for uncovering family secrets and presenting the central characters’ personal dramas. Without doubt, one of the novel’s most striking themes is to show how, when faced with a diametrical change of political and economic system, people in power are instantly able to adapt to new conditions and existential forms, a phenomenon that Parys describes from the viewpoint of several characters from completely different backgrounds and with a diverse range of experiences. Thanks to this polyphonic narrative the main characters – often at the point where life is taking a turn for the worse – are vividly drawn. Another striking theme concerns the division between East and West Germany, with Poland in the background, which Parys develops in an excellent crime-and-thriller style. In just a few months after it was first published Tunel was reissued three times, nominated for the French booksellers’ award Le Prix Libr’à Nous 2018 and the Prix littéraire de la ville de Quimper, and also received extremely positive reviews in the French-language press in France and Belgium.

In 2014 Parys issued her multilayered political thriller Magik (“The Magician”), the second book in the Berlin Trilogy. Like the first one, it is mainly concerned with Polish-German themes (most of the action is set in Berlin, Warsaw and Sofia), where she also describes – precisely and intriguingly – the “Bulgarian trail” in the Stasi’s criminal activity of the Stasi, but above all she writes in captivating detail about the everyday life and tangled fates of the Poles in Berlin.

In 2015 Magik won the European Union Literary Prize. The novel has been reissued several times in Poland and translated into many languages including French, German, Italian, Hungarian, Bulgarian and Croat. The French edition (Le Magicien) met with a particularly positive reception: the newspaper Le Monde compared Parys’s work with that of Thomas Mann, and L’Obs called her “one of the greatest authors of the post-communist era”. In 2019 she was a guest of honour at the Paris Book Fair.

Published in 2020, Książę (“The Prince”) is undoubtedly the most sinister of the Berlin Trilogy in terms of its crime theme, yet in the final part of her saga Parys is mainy concerned with the theme of the resurgence of nationalism: she aptly analyses the political reality, evocatively and convincingly depicting the rebirth of neo-Nazi movements and how they try to take power, mainly by aiming their manipulative tactics at young people.

Parys has won numerous awards for her work, including: the Złota Sowa Polonii awarded by the Polish Intellectuals’ Club in Vienna for the novel Tunel (2013), the European Union Literary Prize for the novel Magik (2015), a nomination for the French booksellers’ award Le prix Libr’à nous (2018), the Prix littéraire de la ville de Quimper (2019), a nomination for the Wielki Kaliber Award for the novel Książę (2021), a nomination for the Złoty Pocisk award in the Best Polish Historical Crime Novel category for  Książę (2021), and the same book won the readers’  Złoty Pocisk award.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Tunel (“The Tunnel”), Warsaw: Świat Książki, 2011
• Magik (“The Magician”), Warsaw: Świat Książki, 2014
• Biała Rika (“White Rika”), Kraków: Znak Literanova, 2016
• Książę (“The Prince”), Warsaw: Agora, 2020

TRANSLATIONS

French:

• Le prince (Książę), trans. Caroline Raszka-Dewez, Villenave-d'Ornon: Agullo 2023

German:

• Der Magier (Magik), trans. Lothar Quinkenstein, Greifswald: freiraum-verlag UG, 2018
• Tunnel (Tunel), trans. Paulina Schulz, Münster: Prospero, 2014

Hungarian:

• A mágus (Magik), trans. Lajos Pálfalvi, Budapest: L'Harmattan, 2020

Italian:

• Il mago: romanzo (Magik), trans. Alessandro Amenta, Milan-Udine: Mimesis Edizioni, 2018