Ryszard Krynicki, one of Poland’s most important contemporary poets, was born in a labor camp in Sankt Valentin (Lower Austria) in 1943. Since the 1960s, when he became known as one of the poets of the New Wave, Krynicki has been associated with the democratic opposition in Poland. As a result, he was subjected to censorship and then banned completely from official publication between 1976 and 1980, although he continued to publish with unofficial presses and, in the case of Our Life Grows (1978), with the Paris émigré press Kultura. After working for years as an editor in underground publishing and running a private art gallery with his wife, Krystyna, in their Poznań apartment, he founded the influential publishing house a5 in 1988; from the start, the press focused on contemporary Polish poetry, including the works of Wisława Szymborska, Adam Zagajewski, and many younger poets. Krynicki is also renowned as a translator of German-language poets, including Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan. A recipient of many prestigious literary awards, he was most recently awarded the Zbigniew Herbert International Poetry Prize in 2015. He lives in Kraków.
Alissa Valles is the author of the poetry books Orphan Fire (2008) and Anastylosis (2014) and the editor and cotranslator of Zbigniew Herbert’s Collected Poems and Collected Prose.
Adam Michnik is a Polish newspaper editor, writer, and historian. He was jailed by the Communist government in 1968 and twice more in the 1980s and has written extensively about postwar Eastern European politics and history, life under a totalitarian regime, and moral and historical philosophy.
