Polish · 1926–2015
Konwicki fought in the Home Army's partisan units in the forests around Vilnius as a teenager, first against the Germans and then against the Soviets, and spent the rest of his life writing about a homeland that had been annexed and a war that had been lost twice. He came to Warsaw, wrote a socialist-realist novel he later disowned, and by the 1960s was producing dreamlike fictions in which the narrator is always a middle-aged Polish writer called Konwicki, drunk, in Warsaw, remembering the forest. He also directed films, including a version of Miłosz's The Issa Valley, and wrote the screenplay for Wajda's Kanał. His best books circulated in samizdat because he refused to submit them to the censors, and A Minor Apocalypse, in which a writer is asked to burn himself alive in front of the Party building, is the funniest novel about late communism anyone wrote.