The potential effects of Brexit and the rightward turn in European politics are set to loom large at next week’s London book fair, but they haven’t dented the enthusiasm of this year’s special guest, Poland, which is jetting in a dazzling range of writers from all corners of literature, many of whom will be giving talks around the city in the evenings.
Olga Tokarczuk, whose novel Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead has just been premiered at the Berlin film festival in an adaptation by Agnieszka Holland titled Spoor, is one of the authors who come bearing hefty books. Anglophone readers will have to wait until 2019 for The Books of Jacob, her massive revisionist version of a troubling episode of 18th-century Polish colonialism, which earned her death threats on publication and went on to sell 150,000 copies, while the slimmer Flights is due out in May.
The relationship between host and guest nations is evident in a growing community of Polish expatriate writers, including AM Bakalar, whose 2012 debut Madame Mephisto dealt with cannabis smuggling between the two countries, and Wioletta Greg, whose coming-of-age debut, Swallowing Mercury, received glowing reviews in the new year.
London also boasts its own Polish publisher – comics specialist Centrala – which insists it is not yet regretting opening an English language business in 2014. “One week after the referendum, the pound to dollar exchange rate changed in our favour due to our deals in the US and Canada,” reports publisher Michał Słomka. “But it took us a while to get used to the fact that the weaker pound meant we would have to pay more to travel to European comics festivals.”
Poland has become a world leader in picture books. Among the most familiar is Maps, by the husband-and-wife team of Daniel Mizieliński and Aleksandra Mizielinska, whose whimsical children’s atlas brought outsized picture books to shops around the world. These self-confessed control freaks sold 3m copies in 32 languages, testing the patience of their publisher as they insisted on hand-finishing every translation themselves. Updating to reflect new political realities poses no worries for them – they have already negotiated the choppy territorial waters of publishing in both Taiwanese and simplified Chinese.
