was born in 1978 in Oraczew, near Sieradz; he is a poet, reporter, traveler, cultural scholar, and forest engineer.

Książek made his debut in 2013 with the warmly received reportage Yakutsk: The Dictionary of a Place. This was the fruit of his several years spent in Yakutsk. With reference to Przemysław Czapliński’s classification strategy of writing about Russia, we might include Książek among the “hunters/textualists.” His immediate precursor would be Mariusz Wilk, who acted somewhat as his patron, writing: I am quite sure that Giedroyć would have been delighted. (…) Combining linguistic/ethnographic notes with a reporter’s eye for his own experiences in Yakutsk, Książek writes a modern extension of the Polish tradition of exploring Siberia. The two authors are joined by how they stress their attachment to a place, their living in it, as opposed to being “visitors” and “collectors,” as well as their special interest in language – Książek learned the Yakutsk tongue and created his reportage as its dictionary. Another important strand of this debut is its search for traces of a nineteenth-century predecessor, the author of Ten Years in the Land of the Yakutsks, Wacław Sieroszewski, which naturally places Książek’s writing in a certain tradition. Yet Yakutsk is no dry, erudite report of a trip to Yakutsk and linguistic studies there – the descriptions of the Siberian cold and winter, and their somatic appeal, show why it was necessary to live there before writing about it.

His poetic debut, The Study of Birds, was an equal success. In the biographical note, the poet defines himself as “a father, and an observer of birds and roads.” The main subject of these poems is everyday life in the Polish countryside, observed with the insight of an ornithologist. Creating analogies between the world of humans and that of birds, the protagonist of these poems focuses on the most important things when it comes to his family nest, and also shows himself to be a keen observer of nature.

In Highway 816, Książek tries to combine the best features of Yakutsk and The Study of Birds. The protagonist sets off on Highway 816 in the winter (the season of choice in Książek’s works), traveling along Poland’s eastern border, and thus along the cultural border between Poland and Ukraine. This is no typical reportage, it is dense and terse prose, joining a naturalist’s wonder, a reporter’s descriptions, and a lyrical sensitivity. The subject of his interest is not only the people he finds, but also the animals, the plants, and the landscapes. The terrain bears painful traces of the past, this is Central Europe as described by Timothy Snyder in Bloodlands, lands afflicted by the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century: Hitler and Stalin, the Holocaust, and the bloody Polish-Ukrainian ethnic conflict. The author reads these territories – through nature, architecture, and the area’s symbols – without superimposing a web of national or ideological concepts. The transparent composition of Highway 816 is based on miniatures, sometimes only a handful of pages long, each a composition unto itself. These are meditations that attempt to get to the essence of places and areas.

Despite his modest list of titles, Michał Książek has received many awards and nominations in the most important Polish literary competitions. Yakutsk brought him a nomination for the Gdynia Literary Award, The Study of Birds took the main prize in the Wrocław Silesius Poetry Award in the debut category, and nominations for the Nike Literary Award and the Golden Mean of Poetry Polish Literary Competition, while Highway 816 took the Gdynia Literary Award in the essay category, and was nominated for the Wiesław Kazanecki Mayor of Białystok Literary Award, the Ryszard Kapuściński Award, the Beata Pawlak Award, and the City of Warsaw Literary Award.

His poems have been translated into Belarussian, Hebrew, and German. Highway 816 has also been released in German.

He lives in the Wilderness Camp in Teremiski.

Artur Nowaczewski

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works:
Poetry collections:
Nauka o ptakach, Fundacja Sąsiedzi, Białystok 2014

Reportage:
Jakuck. Słownik miejsca, Wydawnictwo Czarne, Wołowiec 2013
Droga 816, Fundacja Sąsiedzi, Białystok 2015