Paweł Huelle, one of the prominent Polish writers living today, was born in Gdańsk in 1957. Huelle is a graduate in Polish of the Gdańsk University and has also worked in that city as an employee of the “Solidarity” press office, university lecturer, journalist, director of the Gdańsk Polish Television Center, and, most recently, as a columnist for Gazeta Wyborcza. Huelle has found enormous success as a writer and been honored with many prestigious awards. He published novels, poetry books, and three short story collections. His books, and especially his first novel, Weiser Dawidek (1987) – described by critics as “the book of the decade” – have been widely translated. Huelle’s stories are set in various, scrupulously reconstructed places and historical periods – although they remain associated, for the most part, with the author’s home town of Gdansk and its environs. They represent a record of the author’s own adolescence and his search for a mythical genealogy and spiritual roots. It is worth adding that a large part is played on this record by the memory of literary texts, so that at times we have to do with pastiche, allusions, and dialogues with contemporary authors or literary predecessors (critics have pointed out many points of contact with Günter Grass and Bruno Schulz); all which add another dimension to Huelle’s work.
