Dr. Piotr Florczyk – poet, translator, and Assistant Professor of the UW Slavic and Global Literary Studies – will deliver a lecture “Writing With an Accent” on the nature of bilingualism in literature. He will explore the momentous experiences of living, communicating, and creating art across languages and cultures. As someone who grew up in Kraków and now lives in the United States, he will bring both a scholarly and a personal approach to the topic.

If you identify as a writer, reader, artist, speaker of more than one language, or citizen of more than one culture, then here is the literary event for you. Be sure to attend this evening for the chance to savor both poetry and prose as presented by a brilliant bilingual author and ambassador for Polish literature. 

This is what Prof. Florczyk wrote about this event:

What do Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, Ha Jin, and Jhumpa Lahiri have in common? What does it mean to live between languages and cultures? And why does writing in an acquired language, even though bilingualism is a reality for millions of people around the globe, continue to be resisted by the literary establishment? As the Japanese-German author Yoko Tawada sees it, “Today a human subject is a place where different languages coexist by mutually transforming each other and it is meaningless to cancel their cohabitation and suppress the resulting distortion.” We couldn’t agree more.

Prof. Piotr Florczyk has been published in acclaimed magazines including The New Yorker, Times Literary Supplement, Harvard Review, Boston Review, and Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the winner of the 2017 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award and the 2017 Found in Translation Award. He is also the author of such books as “From the Annals of Krakow” and “East & West”, founding editor of translation press Calypso Editions, and co-founder of experimental press Textshop Editions. He formerly served as Translations Editor for The Los Angeles Review and now sits on the Editorial Board for Brill’s “Literary Multilingualism” book series.

This free public lecture is presented by the UW Polish Studies Endowment Committe at Room 101, Thomson Hall at the University of Washington campus in Seattle.

More: UW PSEC lecture webpage, Prof Florczyk’s webpage.

by NS & RK