Entitled Not There, it is published by Linden Editions in a translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.
In her note, she writes: “Not There is about ordinary people and the things that have happened to them, and it’s impossible for the reader not to share the emotions underlying the stories, as they prompt us to reflect on our own losses and compensations. It’s also about how we remember things - unreliably, on the whole - and how our idea of the truth may be a very personal one.”
Szczygieł’s interlocutors include a Czech poet, a Ukrainian soldier, a Polish accountant, an Albanian painter, an Israeli writer, and the father of a reporter with whom the author travels to Prague for the last time.
Linden Editions writes on its website that the author allows his interlocutors and memories to steer the narrative in unusual directions.
“With a perfect eye and a voice infused with empathy and wit, Szczygieł explores the human condition with its unavoidable absences.”
Mariusz Szczygieł (photo: FOTON/PAP)
Szczygieł is an acclaimed journalist and writer. A reporter for the daily Gazeta Wyborcza, he is the author of numerous books of reportage about the Czech Republic and Poland. His works have been published in twenty-one countries and have received the Europe Book Prize and the Prix Amphi. Not There earned him the Nike Award, Poland’s top literary prize, in 2019.
Antonia Lloyd-Jones is one of the most prominent translators of Polish literature into English. Her translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2019.
Her body of work also includes Paweł Huelle’s Cold Sea Stories, Jacek Dehnel’s Saturn, Zygmunt Miłoszewski’s A Grain of Truth, Artur Domosławski’s Ryszard Kapuściński: A Life, Wojciech Jagielski’s The Night Wanderers, Janusz Korczak’s Kaytek the Wizard, and Warsaw Tales, an anthology of short stories and non-fiction set in the Polish capital.
(mk/mp)