We are happy to announce that the book by Marta Baron-Milian, PhD Neofuturzy i futuryści. Kryptohistorie polskiej awangardy was awarded Gdynia Literary Prize 2023 for Essay.
The Grand Gala took place on 30 August 2024 at the Musical Theatre, Gdynia. The ‘Literature Cube’ statuettes Marty Baron-Milian (Essay), Wojciech Kopeć (Poetry), Grzegorz Bogdał (Prose) and Iwona Zimnicka (Polish Translation).
More information about the prize and the winners on a dedicated website.
Congratulations!
The subject of the book is the beginnings of the Polish literary avant-garde, and, together with them, the energy of the first gestures considered futuristic in the opening of the avant-garde revolt. The author attempts to reinterpret them through the prism of the three main characters of the monograph: Jerzy Jankowski, the eternal harbinger of futurism and the disappearing mediator of its later fate, and Anatol Stern and Aleksander Wat, appearing here primarily in the common role of neo-futurists-primitivists. Their unique activity eludes the narrative of the avant-garde as the history of artistic movements, complicates and decentres the image of avant-garde beginnings, and provokes the search for new points of reference. The author’s archival research, analyses of press material and interpretations of manifestos, as well as poetic and prose texts, made it possible to reconstruct the earliest manifestations of the Polish avant-garde in the light of the concepts of collectivity, peripherality and the concept of ‘minor literature’. This allowed us to capture the originality of linguistic experiments and the political significance of the futuristic provocations of Jankowski, Stern, and Wat. In each of the described cases, the avant-garde challenges the majority, although each time it sounds different.
