Our Lady Gravity

Julia Fiedorczuk (b. 1975) is winner of the 2018 Wisława Szymborska prize for her collection Psalms. She also was nominated for the Nike Literary Award in 2016 for her novel Weightless and for the Silesius Wrocław Poetry Award (and several other awards, including two nominations fo the Julian Tuwim prize for lifetime achievement). In 2005 she received the Hubert Burda Prize for Young Poets for her poems, which were published in the Austrian magazine manuskripte. One of her poems has appeared on the Tube in London as part of the Poems on the Underground project. Two volumes of her poetry— Oxygen and Psalms—are available in English (published by Zephyr, 2017, and University of Wisconsin Press, 2023, respectively). The House of Orion is her third novel, following Under the Sun, both set in eastern Poland. Fiedorczuk lives in Warsaw, where she teaches American poetry and environmental humanities at the University of Warsaw. She also is creator of the experimental School of Ecopoetics at Warsaw’s Institute of Reportage.

Anna Zaranko is a translator of Polish fiction and nonfiction. Her most recent work includes Władysław Reymont’s epic The Peasants (Penguin Books, 2024) for which she received the Found in Translation Award. She translated Kornel Filipowicz’s novella, The Memoir of an Anti-Hero (Penguin Modern Classics, 2020, for which she also received the FIT Award) and is currently working on his short stories, as well as on Julia Fiedorczuk’s novel The House of Orion.