Urszula Honek (born 1987) is a poet and prose writer. She is the author of four books of poetry and a collection of short stories.

Urszula Honek’s poems, particularly those in her two most recent volumes, are minimalist in form but substantial in content, sometimes characterised by a somewhat loose and wide-ranging flow of imaginative associations, and other times by a precision resulting from a very laconic use of words. This is significant for her poetry, for Honek undoubtedly tends to write from a position of constraint, although her imaginative inclinations are also important in her work. As a result, her poems present the reader with concrete images (of the Polish countryside and the people who live there) rather than a clear idea—they often reconstruct reality rather than avoid copying it. The term ‘reality’ should be understood as that of Polish rural life during the past few decades, which reveals itself in Honek’s work to be quite intense, profound and sensual.

Indeed, Urszula Honek’s poems unquestionably stand out for their sensuality, and the lyrical subject is particularly interested in phenomena that take place on the boundary between reality and dreams, often alluding to life and death. What’s important is that both these phenomena are depicted within the context of Polish experience, and not very far in the past, which means that the reader is given an opportunity to interact with protagonists who might have appeared in his or her own world in completely different forms, or even not at all.

In 2022, Urszula Honek made her debut as a prose writer with a collection of short stories titled Białe noce (White Nights). Her prose has a loose, yet significant relationship to her poetry: Honek focuses on careful observation of the peripheries of everyday, provincial Polish life—sometimes inexplicable, other times entirely straightforward—and the peculiarities of the people and events described. The protagonists of the stories in this book are the inhabitants of a small, isolated village in the Beskid Niski Mountains: seemingly ordinary people who, as is often the case, have very personal, sometimes deeply moving life stories. In her descriptions, Honek seeks to dispel the traditional romanticisation and infantilisation of rural areas, at least in Polish literature, and to endow provincial life with the identity and analysis that it deserves.

Urszula Honek made her literary debut in 2015 with the poetry collection Sporysz (“Ergot”), which was shortlisted for the K. I. Gałczyński “Orfeusz” Poetry Award in 2016 and nominated for the “Złoty Środek Poezji” Prize for the best poetry debut of 2015. Honek’s subsequent poetry books have also received recognition from literary critics and award juries. For her second collection, Pod wezwaniem (“Invocations”, 2018), she received the Krakowska Książka Miesiąca (Krakow Book of the Month) Award and was a finalist for the K. I. Gałczyński “Orfeusz” Poetry Award in 2019. For her third poetry volume, titled Zimowanie (“Wintering”, 2021), Honek received the Stanisław Barańczak Scholarship Award. It was nominated in 2022 for the Gdynia Literary Award and the K. I. Gałczyński “Orfeusz” Poetry Award. Honek’s collection of short stories, Białe noce, was nominated for the international Premio Grand Continent Award in 2022 and a Polityka Passport Award. In 2024, the English edition of this book—White Nights, translated by Kate Webster and published in London by MTO Press—was longlisted for the International Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Sporysz (“Ergot”), Poznań: Wojewódzka Biblioteka Publiczna and Centrum Animacji Kultury, 2015
• Pod wezwaniemm (“Invocations”), Poznań: Wojewódzka Biblioteka Publiczna and Centrum Animacji Kultury, 2018
• Zimowanie (“Wintering”), Poznań: Wojewódzka Biblioteka Publiczna and Centrum Animacji Kultury, 2021
• Białe noce (White Nights), Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2022
• Poltergeist (“Poltergeist”), Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Warstwy: 2024

TRANSLATIONS

English:

• White nights (Białe noce), trans. Kate Webster, Brookline, Essex: MTO Press, 2023

German:

• Die weißen Nächte Roman in 13 (Geschichten Białe noce), trans. Renate Schmidgall, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin, 2025