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SUMMARY:Jacek Dukaj with Ursula Phillips – Encounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature
UID:https://instytutpolski.pl/newyork/2026/06/25/jacek-dukaj-with-ursula-phillips-encounters-with-polish-and-ukrainian-literature/
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DESCRIPTION:S6E8 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.
Jacek Dukaj (b. 1974) is one of Poland’s most distinguished science
fiction writers today, working in the literary tradition of Stanisław Lem,
considering philosophical ideas and history in the context of futuristic
scenarios as well writing straightforward essays about literature and the
future of writing more broadly. He has won the European Union Prize for
Literature, Kościelski Literary Award, the Czech Magnesia Litera covering
all genres, and several Janusz A. Zajdel Awards given for science fiction
in Polish, and Ursula Phillips’s translation of his monumental novel,
Ice, is the winner of the Found in Translation Award for books translated
from Polish into English in 2025.
In this episode we take some time to unravel some of the philosophical
issues around the excerpts from Tadeusz Kotarbiński’s essay cited at the
beginning of each section of Ice, and the problem of future contingents, or
how we understand the truth status of statements about events that take
place in the future. We look at the first part as a Warsaw
novel-within-the-novel, and consider the many comparative dimensions of
this rich work which is part dystopian, has a long journey by train, offers
a reconsideration of history around the time of the Russian Revolution if
the first World War were displaced by a world-changing natural occurrence,
and presents the general atmosphere of a kind of futuristic past. We also
consider the complexity of translating a work that is full of neologisms
and is written in an archaic style that doesn’t really have a suitable
analogue in English.
Jacek Dukaj in English translation and recommended resources:
Jacek Dukaj. Ice. Tr. Ursula Phillips. London: Head of Zeus/Bloomsbury,
2025. 
Jacek Dukaj official website.
Ursula Phillips’s most recent translation is Jacek Dukaj’s
sci-fi-cum-alternative-history epic Ice (2007) published in November 2025
by Head of Zeus (Bloomsbury), winner of the Found in Translation Award.
Also in 2025, she contributed translations to The Penguin Anthology of
Polish Short Stories, edited by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, of Pola Gojawiczyńska
and Maria Kuncewiczowa (the latter’s controversial “Covenant with a
Child,” 1927). Other recent translations include Piotr Paziński’s Bird
Streets (2013, trans. 2022) and Agnieszka Taborska’s The Unfinished Life
of Phoebe Hicks (2013, trans. 2024). She has also translated academic books
including Grzegorz Niziołek’s The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust
(2019).
She is an Honorary Research Fellow of the University College London School
of Slavonic and East European Studies, where she worked for twenty-three
years as Area Specialist librarian responsible for the Russian, Ukrainian
and Polish collections and also occasionally taught Polish literature to
undergraduates, before devoting herself primarily to translation. She has
contributed to and co-edited five volumes of essays on Polish literature.
She has been instrumental in introducing the work of Polish women authors
from the 19th and early 20th centuries to Anglophone readers. Translations
include Maria Wirtemberska’s Malvina, or The Heart’s Intuition (1816),
Narcyza Żmichowska’s The Heathen (1846), Zofia Nałkowska’s Choucas
(1927), for which she received the 2015 Found in Translation Award, and
Boundary (1935), for which she received the PIASA Wacław Lednicki Award in
2017.
David A. Goldfarb, Host & ProducerBartek Remisko, Curator and Executive
ProducerNatalia Iyudin, Produce
Image:
Jacek Dukaj © photo by Albert ZawadaUrsula Phillips © Image courtesy of
The Polish Book Institute/Instytut Książki
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