15th May, 19:00- 23:00, Ognisko Polskie – The Polish Hearth Club

Tickets:

15 May | An illustrated conversation with Małgorzata Lebda | Ognisko Polskie – Polish Hearth

Małgorzata Lebda is a Polish poet and fiction writer. She grew up in a hamlet in the Beskid Mountains and now lives in a meadow house in the Suwałki Gap, on Poland’s northeastern border.

She is the author of several poetry collections. Mer de Glace, translated into English by Mira Rosenthal (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2026), received the prestigious Wisława Szymborska Award in 2022, and her most recent poetry book, Dunaj. Chyłe pola, was awarded the Kościelski Foundation Prize in 2025.

Olga Tokarczuk has written of Małgorzata’s work: “Małgorzata Lebda’s poetry never ceases to amaze the reader. Even a chance encounter with it imperceptibly creates an everlasting connection. As eternal as the bond between the frozen sea and the forest.”

In 2023, Lebda published her prose debut, Łakome (Voracious), which received numerous nominations and awards. The novel has been translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Linden Editions, 2025), and a film adaptation is due for release in 2027.

Her books have been translated into numerous languages, including English, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Finnish, Danish, Ukrainian and Serbian.

She is currently working on her second novel.

Małgorzata is also an ultramarathon runner. In 2021, she ran 1,047 km (651 miles) — the entire length of Poland’s longest river, the Vistula — from its source in the Beskid Mountains to its mouth at the Baltic Sea. She set out to run as a poet, not as an athlete, using the rhythms of her own body as a means of understanding and connecting with the rhythms of the river’s waters, now under threat of environmental ruin.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Antonia Lloyd Jones 

Antonia Lloyd-Jones is a British translator of Polish literature based in London.She is best known as the long-time translator of Olga Tokarczuk’s works in English, including Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead which was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2019. The former co-chair of the Translators Association in the United Kingdom from 2015 to 2017, she is also a mentor for the Emerging Translator Mentorship Programme in the National Centre for Writing and has mentored several early-career translators from Polish into English.

Antonia Lloyd-Jones graduated from Oxford after studying Russian and Ancient Greek. After first travelling to Wrocław in 1983 during the period of martial law to visit friends who had been involved in protests, Lloyd-Jones intended to report on the social unrest as a journalist and began learning Polish. While working as the editor of the Polish-language magazine Brytania published by the Central Office of Information, she met author Paweł Huelle at an arts festival in Glasgow after the publication of his first novel in 1987, Weiser Dawidek.The English translation “Who Was David Weiser?” was published by Bloomsbury in 1991.

Since 1991, she has published numerous works by Polish novelists, journalists, essayists, poets, and children’s authors. She began translating from Polish full time in 2001.

Antonia Lloyd-Jones has frequently discussed the challenges of finding publishers willing to take the financial risk of publishing Polish and other “minor” languages compared to more mainstream languages, such as French or Spanish, and lauded the works of small, independent publishers, such as Open Letter Books, that take an interest in “commercially unviable” literature.

Mira Rosenthal

Mira Rosenthal is an American poet and translator of Polish-language writers such as Tomasz Różycki, Małgorzata Lebda, and Krystyna Dąbrowska. Her work has received the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and the Found in Translation Award, among other recognitions, and twice has been nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize as well as for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, the National Translation Award, and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. She is the author of Territorial, a Pitt Poetry Series selection and finalist for the INDIES Book of the Year award, and The Local World, winner of the Wick Poetry Prize. Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, two Fulbright Fellowships, a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies, and residencies at Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and the Jan Michalski Foundation. Her essays, poems, and translations appear regularly in such journals as Poetry, Ploughshares, The New York Review of Books, Harvard Review, PN Review, Threepenny Review, A Public Space, and Oxford American. You can listen to her read her work at the 92nd St. Y, Slate, Poetry, TriQuarterly, The Kenyon Review, and Stanford Storytelling Project’s “Off the Page.”

Raised in northern California, Rosenthal earned her B.A. from Reed College, her M.F.A. from the University of Houston, and her Ph.D. in comparative literature from Indiana University. She served on the Board of Directors of the American Literary Translators Association for five years. She has taught creative writing, literature, and translation at various universities, including as a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell College and as a Fulbright Scholar at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo and lives in the small coastal town of Los Osos, CA.

Photo: Marzena Pogorzały at Culture.pl

Tickets:

15 May | An illustrated conversation with Małgorzata Lebda | Ognisko Polskie – Polish Hearth