Jerzy Pilch


Jerzy Pilch was a Polish writer, columnist, and journalist. Critics have compared Pilch's style to Witold Gombrowicz, Milan Kundera, or Bohumil Hrabal.

Early life and education

Born and raised in the small town of Wisła in the Beskids in southern Poland, Pilch studied Polish philology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and became active in the city's underground literary scene in the late 1970s. He began making his name under the martial law in the 1980s, by writing and reading essays for the "spoken magazine" Na Głos, a regular spoken-word event organised by the oppositional Klub Inteligencji Katolickiej .

Career

In 1989, Pilch began to contribute popular satirical essays for the Kraków-based liberal Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, which established him as a public intellectual. Pilch's best essays from his column in Tygodnik Powszechny appeared in three collections entitled Rozpacz z powodu utraty furmanki, Tezy o głupocie, piciu i umieraniu, and Bezpowrotnie utracona leworęczność.
Also in 1989, he was conferred the Kościelski Award for his debut novel Wyznania twórcy pokątnej literatury erotycznej, an ironic insider's account of the Kraków art scene.
Pilch's second novel, Spis cudzołożnic, tells the story of a failed eccentric writer guiding a foreign guest on a tour of Kraków and through a curio collection of national myths and the absurd socialist realities of the 1980s. In 1995, actor Jerzy Stuhr made the novel into a film as his directing debut.
The same year, Pilch published his third novel Inne rozkosze, the first to appear in English.
Pilch quit his work for Tygodnik Powszechny in 1999, left Kraków entirely, and settled in Warsaw, where he began to write a column for the weekly Polityka. A collection of texts from this series was published as Upadek człowieka pod Dworcem Centralnym in 2002.
Pilch's most successful book so far is his fourth novel Pod Mocnym Aniołem, a satirical take on the "drinking novel" genre, which was awarded a Nike Award, the prestigious Polish literary award, the following year. In 2009, it was translated into English as The Mighty Angel, and in 2010, Tysiąc spokojnych miast was also translated as A Thousand Peaceful Cities.
Several of Pilch's books have been translated into Bulgarian, Dutch, English, Estonian, French, Lithuanian, Russian, Slovak, and Spanish.

Death

Pilch died on 29 May 2020 from complications from Parkinson's disease.

Books