Katarzyna Zechenter

Katarzyna Zechenter is an Associate Professor at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL, specialising in Polish contemporary literature, the history of ideas, the meaning of collective suffering, and cultural trauma in Polish culture. She was 2019 guest editor of the special issue of The Polish Review that explored the meaning of suffering of various ethnic groups on Polish lands, including Poles, Jews, Roma, Ukrainians, and other minorities. She is the author of the first English language monograph of Tadeusz Konwicki (The Fiction of Tadeusz Konwicki: Coming to Terms with Post-war Polish History and Politics), and the editor of a highly popular book on bilingualism (Bilingual and Bicultural: Speaking Polish in North America) that ran to three editions.
She has also written on the transformation of post-1989 spatial identity of model Communist cities such as Nowa Huta and Dunaújváros, the concept of suffering; memory and identity formation and on Polish-Jewish literature after WWII and on literature devoted to the events of 1968 in Poland.
Zechenter is also an award-winning poet whose poems regularly appear in major literary journals in Poland, USA, India or Bhutan (Tashi Delek). Her last volume of poetry, There and Here, (Tam i tutaj: Poznań 2019) won The Best Book Award of the Union of Polish Writers Abroad 2019. It was nominated for Orfeusz Literary Prize for 2019.