Ewa Lipska is our second guest writer of Polish origin. Like Olga Tokarczuk, who was a guest in the Amsterdam Residency in 2007, she is interested in the heyday of the Dutch cartography and will look for material dating back to Joan Blaeu’s times.
Lipska was born in 1945 in Krakow. After graduating from the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts, where she studied painting and art history, she made her debut in 1967 with her collection Poems, and immediately established herself as one of the key critical voices of the postwar generation.
She worked as an editor for the city’s leading literary publishing house Wydawnictwo Literackie and for several years was a poetry editor of the literary magazine Pismo, which she co-founded. Her 1985 collection Przechowalnia CiemnoĊci (The Darkness Repository) was published by the underground Warsaw Independent Poets’ and Artists’ Publishing House. In 1990 she became Poland’s cultural representative in Austria and divided her time between Krakow and Vienna, where she held the position of Director of the Polish Cultural Institute throughout the 1990s. Besides poetry, Ewa Lipska writes prose, drama and song lyrics.
Lipska stays for one month (June) during which she has two public performances.
At Tuesday June 8th, Lipska will read her poetry during a lunch lecture at cultural centre Spui 25 in Amsterdam from 12:20 - 12:40.
The presence of Lipska in the Netherlands along with the film portrait that was recently made of Wislawa Szymborska inspired the Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam to organize an evening about Krakow literature. Both ladies live in the same city and are friends. Friday June 18th, 20.00 o’clock
Three selections of Lipska’s poems have been translated into Dutch by Ad van Rijsewijk and Karol Lesman:
- Huis voor een vredige jeugd - Masereelfonds Gent 1982
- Mensen voor beginners - De Geus 2000
- Splinter - De Geus 2007
