Andrzej Stasiuk is one of Poland's most notable fiction writers. He was born in 1960 in Warsaw. After being expelled from high school he became active in the pacifist movement, was drafted into the army, deserted, and spent more than a year in jail. Later he began writing for the underground press. In 1987 he moved to a hamlet in the Lemko Region, where he and his wife run the small Czarne publishing house. His other writing includes Mury Hebronu (The Walls of Hebron, short stories), Dukla, and the novel Biały kruk (White Raven).

Tales of Galicia, seemingly a collection of prose ballads about a mythical village facing the trauma of 1990s-style economic transformation, gradually reinvents itself as a novel. Stasiuk brilliantly blurs the line between genres as he explores the fissures in existence where there is often little difference between the living and the dead, death and sleep, dream and reality, the real and the televised, and between civilization and nature.

On the book

On the author

Return to Books index