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Authors by Country · PolandThe Best Polish Authors to Read
Polish literature has been written through partition, occupation, the Holocaust, communism and its end, and much of it asks how individuals keep their judgement, their memory and their sense of humour under that pressure. It includes four Nobel Prize winners, a modernist short-story writer murdered in 1942, a science-fiction writer read worldwide, a school of literary reportage and the fantasy saga behind The Witcher.
The list is ordered chronologically by year of birth. Every writer included was born in or wrote from Poland, or territory that was Polish at the time, and has at least one book available in English translation; the suggested starting point names the English title and, where it could be confirmed, the translator. Canonical names sit alongside living novelists.
Twelve Polish authors, and where to start with each
Henryk Sienkiewicz
1846–1916 · Wola Okrzejska, Poland
Sienkiewicz wrote large historical novels, first serialised in newspapers. His Trilogy, With Fire and Sword (1884), The Deluge (1886) and Sir Michael (1887–88), is set in seventeenth-century Poland-Lithuania; later came The Knights of the Cross (1900) and the adventure novel In Desert and Wilderness (1911).
Quo Vadis (1896), set among the early Christians of Nero’s Rome, made him internationally famous, and he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1905 for his merits as an epic writer. He died in Vevey, Switzerland, in 1916; his remains were moved to Warsaw in 1924.
Read Sienkiewicz if you want sweeping historical adventure on the scale of Dumas or Tolstoy.
Start with Quo Vadis (1896). In Nero’s Rome the patrician Marcus Vinicius falls in love with Lygia, a Christian hostage, as persecution follows the Great Fire; English translations include those by Jeremiah Curtin and W. S. Kuniczak. Or With Fire and Sword (1884). The first novel of the Trilogy, set during the Khmelnytsky Uprising, in a modern translation by W. S. Kuniczak (1991).
Bruno Schulz
1892–1942 · Drohobycz (now Drohobych, Ukraine)
Schulz was a Polish-Jewish writer and artist from the Galician town of Drohobycz. His two story collections, The Cinnamon Shops (1934), known in English as The Street of Crocodiles, and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1937), turn a provincial family and town into dense, dreamlike myth. He illustrated the original editions himself.
In November 1942 he was shot dead by a Gestapo officer in the Drohobycz ghetto, and his unfinished novel The Messiah was lost. His surviving fiction fits in a single volume of collected stories.
Read Schulz if you like Kafka and prose that reads like poetry.
Start with The Street of Crocodiles (1934). Sklepy cynamonowe: linked stories of a family and a shop in a small Galician town, translated by Celina Wieniewska (1963). Or Collected Stories. Both collections and the uncollected stories in a new translation by Madeline G. Levine (Northwestern University Press, 2018).
Witold Gombrowicz
1904–1969 · Małoszyce, Poland
Gombrowicz wrote comic, grotesque novels about immaturity, form and the masks people force on one another. Ferdydurke (1937), a satire on immaturity, was followed by Trans-Atlantyk (1953), Pornografia (1960) and Cosmos (1965). His Diary, kept from 1953 to 1969, is as widely read as the novels.
He was in Buenos Aires when war broke out in 1939 and stayed in Argentina until 1963, then settled in Vence in France, where he died. He won the Prix International (Formentor) in 1967. Danuta Borchardt’s direct translations from the Polish replaced earlier versions made through other languages.
Read Gombrowicz if you enjoy absurd, provocative comedy with philosophical bite.
Start with Ferdydurke (1937). His first novel, a satire on immaturity and the forms imposed by school and society, translated directly from the Polish by Danuta Borchardt (Yale, 2000). Or Diary (1969). His journal of exile and ideas, translated by Lillian Vallee.
Czesław Miłosz
1911–2004 · Šeteniai, Lithuania
Miłosz was a poet and essayist whose work moves between his childhood in Lithuania, the Second World War and the moral pressures of communism. His books include Rescue (1945), poems about his wartime experiences; The Captive Mind (1953), a study of intellectuals under Stalinism; the novel The Issa Valley (1955); and the memoir Native Realm (1959).
He broke with communist Poland in 1951 while serving as a diplomat, lived in France, and from 1960 taught at the University of California, Berkeley. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980 and returned to Kraków, where he died in 2004. The poet Robert Hass translated much of his poetry.
Read Miłosz if you want to understand how intellectuals live with, and resist, a totalitarian state.
Start with The Captive Mind (1953). A study of how writers under Stalinism conformed outwardly while dissenting in private, translated by Jane Zielonko (1953). Or The Issa Valley (1955). His novel drawn from his childhood in Lithuania.
All Czesław Miłosz books →Stanisław Lem
1921–2006 · Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine)
Lem wrote science fiction about the limits of human knowledge: what happens when people meet an intelligence they cannot understand, or build machines that outthink them. His books range from the comic Ijon Tichy stories of The Star Diaries (1957) and the robot fables of The Cyberiad (1965) to the serious novels Solaris (1961), His Master’s Voice (1968) and Fiasco (1986).
His books have sold more than 45 million copies and been translated into dozens of languages. He died in Kraków in 2006. He is the obvious starting point for readers who think they do not like science fiction.
Read Lem if you want science fiction that is really philosophy.
Start with Solaris (1961). A psychologist arrives at a research station above an ocean-covered planet whose ocean materialises figures from the crew’s memories; the widely available English text is the 1970 Kilmartin and Cox translation, made from the French. Or The Cyberiad (1965). Comic fables about two robot constructors, a lighter way into his ideas.
Wisława Szymborska
1923–2012 · Prowent (now Kórnik), Poland
Szymborska wrote short, clear, often witty poems that start from an ordinary object or fact and arrive at questions about chance, history and death. Her collections include Calling Out to Yeti (1957), Salt (1962), A Large Number (1976), The End and the Beginning (1993) and Here (2009).
She moved to Kraków with her family in 1931 and lived there until her death in 2012. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996. Her poems are among the most accessible in modern European poetry and work well for readers new to poetry.
Read Szymborska if you want poems that are witty, short and still philosophically serious.
Start with Map: Collected and Last Poems (2015). Her poems from seven decades in chronological order, translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
All Wisława Szymborska books →Ryszard Kapuściński
1932–2007 · Pinsk (now Belarus)
Kapuściński was a correspondent for the Polish Press Agency who reported on decolonisation in Africa and on revolutions and coups in Latin America and Asia. His books, among them Another Day of Life (1976), The Soccer War (1978), Shah of Shahs (1982), Imperium (1993) and The Shadow of the Sun (1998), mix reporting with literary technique.
That mix has been disputed: critics and his biographer Artur Domosławski have questioned where reportage ends and invention begins, while Kapuściński described his work as partly allegorical. His books are best read as literature about power and its collapse.
Read Kapuściński if you like reportage that reads like a novel and do not mind its blurred line with fiction.
Start with The Emperor (1978). Cesarz: the court of Haile Selassie and the fall of his regime, told through the voices of former servants and courtiers; English edition 1983. Or Travels with Herodotus (2004). Podróże z Herodotem, his late book about his early travels as a reporter.
All Ryszard Kapuściński books →Wiesław Myśliwski
1932–2026 · Dwikozy, Poland
Myśliwski wrote novels about village life in the Polish countryside and the changes that followed the Second World War, told by narrators who circle back through memory, family and the land. His books include The Palace (1970), Stone Upon Stone (1984), Horizon (1996) and A Treatise on Shelling Beans (2006).
He twice won the Nike Award, Poland’s main literary prize. Bill Johnston’s translation of Stone Upon Stone won the Best Translated Book Award in 2012. He died in Warsaw in March 2026, aged 94.
Read Myśliwski if you like long, digressive narrators and fiction about rural life and memory.
Start with Stone Upon Stone (1984). Kamień na kamieniu: a wounded former resistance fighter back on the family farm recalls his parents, brothers and lovers while planning a family tomb, translated by Bill Johnston (Archipelago Books). Or A Treatise on Shelling Beans (2006). Traktat o łuskaniu fasoli, also translated by Bill Johnston (2013).
Hanna Krall
Born 1935 · Warsaw, Poland
Hanna Krall is a reporter and writer whose short, pared-back books deal with the Holocaust in Poland and its afterlife. As a child she was hidden by Polish rescuers; her parents were murdered at Majdanek. Her best-known book, Zdążyć przed Panem Bogiem (1977), is built from interviews with Marek Edelman.
Her other books in English include The Subtenant, The Woman from Hamburg and Other True Stories and the novel Chasing the King of Hearts (2006). Her year of birth is usually given as 1935, though some sources say 1937.
Read Krall if you want to read about the Holocaust through spare, precise testimony.
Start with Shielding the Flame (1977). Zdążyć przed Panem Bogiem: a book built on an interview with Marek Edelman, published in English in 1986; also included as To Outwit God in The Subtenant / To Outwit God (1992). Or Chasing the King of Hearts (2006). Król kier znów na wylocie, a short novel published in English by Peirene Press (2013).
Andrzej Sapkowski
Born 1948 · Łódź, Poland
Sapkowski studied economics and worked in foreign trade and as a translator of science fiction before writing his first Witcher story for the magazine Fantastyka in 1986. The saga that followed, about the witcher Geralt, began with story collections such as The Last Wish (1993) before continuing as a sequence of novels.
The books have been adapted as video games from 2007 and as a Netflix series from 2019. He also wrote the Hussite Trilogy (2002–2006), set in the fifteenth-century Hussite Wars, and received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2016.
Read Sapkowski if you want fantasy with morally grey heroes, or loved the games or the series.
Start with The Last Wish (1993). Ostatnie życzenie: six Witcher stories framed by Geralt recovering in a temple, translated by Danusia Stok (Gollancz, 2007). Or Blood of Elves. The first full novel of the saga; its English translation won the David Gemmell Legend Award in 2009.
Olga Tokarczuk
Born 1962 · Sulechów, Poland
Tokarczuk, who trained as a clinical psychologist, writes novels that move freely between genres, from Primeval and Other Times (1996) and the fragmentary Flights (2007) to the village mystery Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009), the long historical novel The Books of Jacob (2014) and The Empusium (2022).
She was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature in 2019, and Flights won the Man Booker International Prize in 2018 for her and her translator Jennifer Croft. She has twice won Poland’s Nike Award.
Read Tokarczuk if you like idea-driven fiction that mixes genres.
Start with Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009). Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych: an ageing former teacher in a remote Silesian village becomes convinced that animals are taking revenge on the local hunters, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (2018). Or Flights (2007). Bieguni, the novel that won the Man Booker International Prize, translated by Jennifer Croft (2018).
All Olga Tokarczuk books →Szczepan Twardoch
Born 1979 · Knurów, Poland
Twardoch writes violent, morally complex novels about identity and history in twentieth-century Poland. His books include Morphine (2012), Drach (2014), The King of Warsaw (2016), set in the Jewish underworld of 1937 Warsaw, The Kingdom (2018), Pokora (2020) and Null (2025), which won the Nike Award in 2026.
A Polish-Silesian writer, he writes in Polish and Silesian and lives in Upper Silesia. He won the Brücke Berlin Literary Prize in 2016 for Drach, and The King of Warsaw was adapted as a television series for Canal+.
Read Twardoch if you like dark historical crime fiction with a political edge.
Start with The King of Warsaw (2016). Król: in 1937 Warsaw a Jewish boxer and enforcer for a crime boss takes in the son of a man he has killed, as fascist groups gain ground, translated by Sean Gasper Bye (Amazon Crossing, 2020).
Which Polish author should you read first?
The best starting point depends on what you want from a book.
- For historical adventure — Henryk Sienkiewicz, Quo Vadis (1896)
- For short modernist fiction — Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles (1934)
- For science fiction — Stanisław Lem, Solaris (1961)
- For poetry — Wisława Szymborska, Map: Collected and Last Poems (2015)
- For reportage — Ryszard Kapuściński, The Emperor (1978)
- For a book club — Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009)
Where to go next
Frequently asked questions
Who is the most famous Polish author?
Internationally, the best-known names are the Nobel Prize winners Henryk Sienkiewicz, Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska and Olga Tokarczuk, together with Stanisław Lem, whose books have sold more than 45 million copies, and Andrzej Sapkowski, author of The Witcher.
How many Polish writers have won the Nobel Prize in Literature?
Five. Four of them are on this list: Henryk Sienkiewicz (1905), Czesław Miłosz (1980), Wisława Szymborska (1996) and Olga Tokarczuk (the 2018 prize, awarded in 2019). The fifth is Władysław Reymont (1924).
What is the best Polish book to start with?
For fiction, Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is accessible and widely available. For something short, try Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, or Szymborska’s poems.
Is The Witcher based on Polish books?
Yes. The video games and the Netflix series are based on Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher stories and novels; the first story appeared in 1986 and the collection The Last Wish in 1993.
Which Polish books deal with the Second World War and the Holocaust?
Hanna Krall’s Shielding the Flame, Czesław Miłosz’s Rescue and Wiesław Myśliwski’s Stone Upon Stone deal with the war or its aftermath, and Szczepan Twardoch’s The King of Warsaw is set on its eve; Bruno Schulz was himself killed in 1942.
Who translates Polish literature into English?
Translators named on this list include Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Jennifer Croft, Bill Johnston, Danuta Borchardt, Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak, Celina Wieniewska, Madeline G. Levine and Sean Gasper Bye.
Start with the author whose questions interest you most. The book you remember longest may not be the one with the clearest answers, but the one that changes how you see something familiar.
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