Poland’s top annual literary prize has been awarded to fantasy writer Radek Rak for his reimagining of 19th-century Polish history. The readers’ award went to Joanna Gierak-Onoszko for her reportage on the abuse faced by indigenous people in Canada who were forced to attend residential schools.
The Nike Literary Award, established in 1997, is given annually for the best book published in Polish over the previous year. Previous recipients have included two Nobel Prize winners, Czesław Miłosz and Olga Tokarczuk (twice).
Rak’s winning novel tells the tale of Jakub (or Jakób) Szela, the leader of a peasant uprising against the gentry in the Galicia region of Central and Eastern Europe in 1846, during the period when Poland was partitioned between foreign powers.
According to the publisher, “the fairy tale is an attempt to recreate the mythology of Galicia. It is not a historical novel, although it is written with great respect for the social, moral and political realities of the time.”
Rak’s portrait of a figure who has already featured prominently in Polish literature and been mythologised as both a traitor and a class hero, concentrates on Szela’s young love for Hannah, a Jewish innkeeper’s daughter. It has strong elements of magical realism, telling of a world in which water nymphs dance, young girls walk in the air and hearts can be physically plucked out and given to one’s love.
Paweł Próchniak, head of the award’s jury, said that “various echoes and tones of literature” could be heard in the novel and that it contained “the voices of many writers”.
Katarzyna Janowska, culture editor at the Onet website, compared the book to the work of Gabriel García Márquez as well as 20th-century Polish writer Bruno Schulz.
“The winner of the Nike Award creates a fairy-tale world rooted in historical fact. He moves history into the space of universal myth. A trained vet brings into his story sensitivity to nature, animals, a world parallel to our own,” she said.
Rak, who writes in his free time while working as a veterinarian in Kraków, was surprised by the award for his third fantasy novel. “I am honoured and very pleased. I didn’t expect this and didn’t prepare anything, and I write better than I speak,” he said in his acceptance speech, quoted by Onet.
As well as the main jury prize, an audience award is also given each year, voted for by the public. This year’s prize went to Joanna Gierak-Onoszko for her book The 27 Deaths of Toby Obed.
Gierak-Onoszko was writing for a Polish magazine in Toronto when she chanced upon a photograph of Toby Obed on stage with Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau.
Obed was the lead plaintiff in a case that led to a settlement for indigenous people like him, who were sent away from their homes in Newfoundland and Labrador to residential schools, where they were often abused. Gierak-Onoszko contacted Obed, and his story became her first book.
“It is really one of the books I will remember of 2019 – it’s an overwhelming debut,” literary critical Michał Nogaś told the CBC.
"To me Toby is kind of an invincible figure. He's like a phoenix, he's always rising from the ashes," said author Joanna Gierak-Onoszko. https://t.co/fyWsuGaC7K
— CBC News (@CBCNews) July 30, 2019
Main image credit: Slawomir Kaminski / Agencja Gazeta
Ben Koschalka is a translator and senior editor at Notes from Poland. Originally from Britain, he has lived in Kraków since 2005.
