S6E4 and all video recordings are available on our YouTube.

Encounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature is a video series for anyone interested in literature and the culture of books and reading. Each month, host David A. Goldfarb will present a new topic in conversation with an expert on that author or book or movement in Polish literature. More about the Encounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature series and the timeline.

Michał Witkowski (b. 1975) made a big impression on the Polish literary scene in the early 2000s as an out gay writer with his stylistically rich, novel, Lubiewo, translated as Lovetown by W. Martin, about gay life in Poland in the 1970s and 80s, and engaging many earlier works in the history of Polish literature and European literature more broadly. The novel was shortlisted for Poland’s highest literary award, the Nike Prize, and won the Gdynia Literary Prize in 2006 and has been translated into eleven languages thus far. The English translation was nominated for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2011. He has also won the Paszport Polityki in 2007 and two more of his novels have been nominated for the Nike. In more recent years he has been using Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube as platforms for literary experiments.

In this episode we discuss Lovetown, its offshoot Eleven-Inch, and a more recent story set on a train from Międzyzdroje near Lubiewo to Wrocław in the early 2000s after the fall of Communism, but before Poland was standing on its own feet as a capitalist European country. In Lovetown we look at the tension between the closeted gay generation of the 1970s and 80s and the emerging emancipated generation seeking equal rights in areas such as gay marriage. Eleven-Inch we can see the awkward relationship between wealthy gay men in Western Europe and rent boys from Poland and other former Soviet-bloc countries looking to earn money in the Austria, Switzerland, and Germany. Our guest also gives us an overview of the history of queer literature, broadly construed, in Poland.

Michał Witkowski in English translation and recommended reading:

Błażej Warkocki, “From Poland with love: Politics of queerness in the time of neoliberal post-socialism (The case of Michał Witkowski),” Open Research Europe, 2025.

Michał Witkowski. Eleven-Inch. Tr. W. Martin. London: Seagull Books, 2021.

Michał Witkowski. “Fare-Dodging to Paradise.” Tr. W. Martin. The Penguin Book of Polish Short Stories. Ed. Antonia Lloyd-Jones. New York: Penguin, 2025. Pgs. 260-62.

Michał Witkowski. Lovetown. Tr. W. Martin. London: Portobello Books, 2010. Also see the 2012 edition from Granta Books.

William Martin is an educator, editor and translator from Polish and German. His publications include Michał Witkowski’s novels Eleven-Inch from Seagull Books in 2021 and Lovetown from Portobello Books in 2010, Erich Kästner’s children’s book Emil and the Detectives published by Overlook in 2007, and Natasza Goerke’s short-story collection Farewells to Plasma from Twisted Spoon in 2002. He has translations forthcoming of Witold Gombrowicz’s novel Cosmos from Fitzcarraldo Editions and Hubert Fichte’s ethnopoetic novel Puberty from Seagull Books. He is the recipient of Fulbright and National Endowment of the Arts fellowships, has had residencies at Yaddo and the Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators, teaches for Bard College and Pratt Institute, and lives in Berlin.

David A. Goldfarb, Host & Producer
Bartek Remisko, Curator and Executive Producer
Natalia Iyudin, Produce