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Literature
Champions of the (Literary) Force Olga Tokarczuk (born 1962) An author who's pulled off an impossible trick for years: she is praised by critics and adored by a mass readership. Every book by Tokarczuk is an event debated about in both specialists and social media. Her novels are crammed with myths, factoids, legends and slices of everyday life. In her books you’ll find the story of a bearded female saint, a cake recipe using poisonous, psychedelic fly agaric mushrooms, and the trick for avoiding evil according to the Beguny sect of Old Believers: always keep moving. Special power: The finest dreadlocks in Polish highbrow literature • Dorota Masłowska (born 1983) Debuted in 2002 with White and Red, a virtuoso composition with borrowings from street language, pop culture, and the trash heap of everyday media
fodder. Masłowska (above) captures spot-on the climate of Poland in constant turmoil, aiming high but sinking into a swamp of complexes and illusions. She’s recently been doing the same as a songwriter (under the pseudonym Mister D.). Special power: Girlish charm. Masłowska ventured onto the literary scene over a decade ago but remains a volatile enfant terrible • Andrzej Stasiuk (born 1960) Writes novels, stories and essays, and with Monika Sznajderman co-owns the Czarne publishing house, specializing in promotion of literature from Central & Eastern Europe as well as reportage. Stasiuk’s works can be shuffled to suit a range of readers, from tales of sexual escapades to meditative travel essays from the trackless wilds of the ‘worse Europe’ .Unexpectedly, Stasiuk’s oeuvre also includes a volume of love poems.
Special power: Distance. The writer lives in the village of Wołowiec in the Low Beskid mountains and rarely leaves his hideaway; you won’t catch him riding the media bandwagon • Jacek Dukaj (born 1974) Dispels the myth that at a certain age you can’t admit ‘My favourite literary genre is fantasy’. A short story of his, The Cathedral, was made into an animated short film by Tomasz Bagiński which was nominated for an Oscar. Dukaj’s most famous work is the monumental novel Ice, where in an alternative world at the threshold of the 20th century Europe freezes over and Russia becomes a scientific and industrial power. Special power: Diversification. Ice is literally weighty, at 1,054 pages in hardback, but Dukaj also wrote the ephemeral hypertext work The Old Axolotl, available exclusively as an ebook •