Wioletta Grzegorzewska

Wioletta Grzegorzewska, Wioletta Greg (9 February 1974) is a Polish poet and writer, born in a small village Rzeniszów in Jurassic Highland in Poland. In 2006, she left her country and moved to the Isle of Wight. She lives in Essex.

Wioletta spent ten years in Czestochowa where she organised cultural events, edited student journals, wrote articles about local literary developments. Between 1998 – 2012 she published six poetry volumes, as well as a novella Guguły, in which she's covering her childhood and the experience of growing up in Communist Poland. Senior editor Max Porter from Portobello Books said:

Guguły^[1] is an enchanting and intriguing book. Wioletta Greg is a poet and every line of this haunting autobiographical novella has its own weird, beautiful atmosphere. It reminded me of Evie Wyld, Ludmila Petrushevskaya and Herta Muller."^[2]

Greg's short stories and poems^[3] have been published in: Asymptote,^[4] The Guardian,^[5] Litro Magazine, Poetry Wales, Wasafiri, The White Review.^[6]

Her poetry book Finite Formulae & Theories of Chance has been shortlisted for the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize.^[7][8] The judges said:

"These poems, as translated from Polish into English by Marek Kazmierski, retain the force of first experience and, equally, a collection of history’s remains. Greg’s thoughts include the catastrophe of the 20th century whose marks still wobble before her eyes, and the experience of living in post-Communist Poland. This stunning collection shows us (mostly through the eyes and memories of childhood) a world of objects transported across years. ‘Tossing satin bulbs into wicker baskets,’ the child poet is at ease with the earth and the hardy objects made from it. Greg grants us the privilege of seeing what she saw before she saw more."^[9]

Wioletta has won The Goldene Eule 2015 in Vienna. In 2012 an Arts Council-funded audio recording project of the British Library, Between Two Worlds: Poetry and Translation, recorded her poetry.^[10] Her poems have been translated into English^[11] by Marek Kazmierski, Anna Hyde, Catalan ^[12] by Xavier Farre and Welsh.

Works

Poetry

• Wyobraznia kontrolowana, Czestochowa, 1998
• Parantele, Czestochowa, 2003
• Orinoko, Tychy, 2008. ISBN 83-88415-77-8
• Inne obroty, Polish-Canadian Publishing Fund and Fraza, Toronto and Rzeszów, 2010, ISBN 978-0-921724-59-9
• Ruchy Browna, Czestochowa, 2011
• Smena's Memory. Collected Poems, trans. by Marek Kazmierski, London: Off_Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-9563946-8-2
• Finite Formulae and Theories of Chance, trans. by Marek Kazmierski, Arc Publications 2014, ISBN 978-1908376-91-6 (shortlisted for the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize)

Prose

• Notatnik z wyspy, Czestochowa, 2012. ISBN 978-83-89401-40-3
• Guguly, Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2014. ISBN 978-83-7536-696-9 (shortlisted for Nike Award in Poland)

Anthologies

• Scattering the Dark: An Anthology of Polish Women Poets, ed. Karen Kovacik, Buffalo, New York: White Pine Press, 2015. ISBN 978-1935210825

References

External links

• Profile in Culture.pl
• Works on Emigrating Landscapes Project
• Selected Poems in European Literature Night
• Poem Thirteen, in a Gulag, 1950