Jerzy Pilch

Who is Jerzy Pilch?

Jerzy Pilch is a Polish writer and journalist. Critics have compared Pilch's style to Witold Gombrowicz, Milan Kundera, or Bohumil Hrabal.

Born and raised in the small town of Wisła in the Beskids in southern Poland, Pilch studied Polish philology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and became active in the city's underground literary scene in the late 1970s. He began making his name under the martial law in the 1980s, by writing and reading essays for the "spoken magazine" Na Głos, a regular spoken-word event organised by the oppositional Klub Inteligencji Katolickiej.

In 1989 Pilch began to contribute highly popular satirical essays for the Kraków-based liberal Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, which established him as a public intellectual. Pilch's best essays from his column in Tygodnik Powszechny appeared in three collections entitled Rozpacz z powodu utraty furmanki, Tezy o głupocie, piciu i umieraniu, and Bezpowrotnie utracona leworęczność.