Polish · 1934–1969
Hłasko worked as a lorry driver in the forests of Lower Silesia before he published anything, and wrote in a hard, American-sounding Polish about drunks, thugs, construction sites and women in ruined Warsaw flats. He became famous at twenty-two, was the face of the 1956 thaw, and in 1958 went to Paris to collect a prize and refused to come back after the Polish authorities demanded he stop publishing in the émigré press. They cancelled his passport. He spent eleven years as a stateless person — Israel, Germany, Italy, Los Angeles — working as a labourer and a pilot's mate, drinking, fighting, marrying a German film star, and writing books nobody in Poland was allowed to read. He died in Wiesbaden in 1969 of alcohol and sleeping pills, at thirty-five. Polish readers had to wait until 1989 to get most of his work legally.