Polish · 1884–1954
Nałkowska was the daughter of a Warsaw geographer, published her first novel at twenty-two, and spent the interwar years as one of the most prominent writers in Poland — a feminist, a campaigner for prisoners' rights, vice-president of the Polish PEN Club, and the reader who recognised Bruno Schulz's genius from a letter and got him published. Her fiction before the war was psychological and concerned with women's inner lives; The Border, from 1935, examines a man's career and betrayals from every social angle around him. After the war she served on the Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, visiting camps, exhumations and interrogations. Out of that work came Medallions, eight short pieces of testimony that constitute the earliest and most restrained literary response to the extermination. She died in Warsaw in 1954.