Michał Witkowski

Michał Witkowski (1975 ) is a Polish writer living in Warsaw. After publishing the collection of short stories Copyright in 2001, he shot to fame with his novel Lubiewo (2005). In 2009 the journal Polityka awarded him its Passport for literature. His most recent novel, Margot, appeared in 2009.

He left the house and hasn’’t been seen since

Photo: Peter Župník Ever since I can remember I’’ve been fascinated by notices of young people gone missing, posted at railway stations and bus stops. And although the Itaka Foundation shows that people of all gender and age groups go missing, the ones that really scream out at you from the poster pillars are the young ones. Imagination goes into overdrive. If someone has left home to see a friend and hasn’’t come back in years it must mean he has fallen through the cracks of reality into a realm ordinary mortals have no access to, one we can only […]

Confessions of a Mamone

Given that ever since the Renaissance Europe has been so definitively split into Catholicism and Protestantism and so entrenched in its habits, I wasn’’t in the least surprised to learn from a Swiss acquaintance that coffee was more Protestant while tea was more Catholic. In response, I ostentatiously sipped from my cup, proud of the fact that it happened to contain coffee. And even though no one on either side of the barricade really believes in God that much, the dichotomies of habit remain, allowing us to speculate endlessly and to keep dividing the world in two halves. Thus the […]

You’’ve got to love yourself!

The following scene takes place in Kiev; a change of flights has necessitated spending a night at an airport hotel. The very topic of Ukrainian hotels would be sufficient for a sizeable feuilleton. It’’s worth adding that no major hotel chains operate in this country.  The standard of this hotel was therefore, as was to be expected, typically Ukrainian – complete with no running water, water-taps falling off, peeling wallpaper, cockroaches and mice in the lift. Two kinds of room were on offer: normal , without a bathroom and lux.  The lux room was dirty and miserable as if it […]