Adam Czerniawski is a poet in Polish and a translator, anthologist and critic of Polish poetry. Born in Warsaw in 1934, he left Poland during the war and lived in the Middle East from 1941 to 1947, later writing about his experiences in his autobiography, Scenes from a Disturbed Childhood (Serpent’s Tail, 1999). He studied in England, receiving degrees in philosophy and English literature, and later lectured in philosophy in the 1970s and 1980s. As a student, he was part of a group of young avant-garde Polish poets in London, Kontynenty (Continents) and edited their magazine.

His Selected Poems 1953-1978 was published in Poland in 1982, and a bilingual Polish-English Selected Poems, translated and edited by Iain Higgins, was published by Harwood in 2000. The translator of volumes by Norwid, Staff, Stoinski, Szymborska and most famously Tadeusz Różewicz into English , he is also the editor of The Burning Forest (Bloodaxe, 1988), translations of seventeen Polish poets, and editor of The Mature Laurel: essays on modern Polish poetry (Seren, 1991).

He was Assistant Director of The British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia, and administrator of the International Retreat for Writers at Hawthornden Castle until 1999. He received the Kościelski Foundation Award in 1971.

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Related links

› Author Page at WAB Publishers, Warsaw

› Adam Czerniawski profile and bibliography