Izabela Filipiak

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Izabela Filipiak, 2008

Izabela Filipiak (born 1961 in Gdynia) is a Polish writer, an essayist, a columnist, and a scholar.

Biography

She debuted in the beginning of the 90s as one of the most distinct figures of Polish literary life.[1] In her short stories and essays, she promoted the new literature in democratic Poland as open to voices previously excluded from cultural discourse. Her novel Absolutna Amnezja published in 1995, critiques the communist past from the point of view of socially maladjusted young women. The book mixes satirical representation of authoritarian schools and dysfunctional families with historical events from the pre-Solidarity period and discusses education as breaking the girls' spirits through an elaborate application of double standards. When the critics attacked the novel, Maria Janion, the renowned literary historian, came to its rescue,[2] thus launching the major debate about the absence of feminism in the Polish cultural tradition.[3]

Starting in the late 90s, Filipiak was teaching creative writing classes at the gender studies department of

Warsaw University and in the College of Arts at Letters at Jagiellonian University in Kraków. She published a creative writing handbook, Tworcze Pisanie dla Mlodych Panien, which she addressed mainly to women writers and men inspired to embrace their inner fem. She wrote an introduction to the first translation of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own.[4] In 1997, she came out as a gay in the Polish edition of Cosmopolitan and on national TV. She claimed that coming out improved both her personal life and her career, as she began to write columns for top shelf magazines. Starting in 2000, her tone became more critical, and she began to comment on the rise of populism and homophobia in Poland. These columns were eventually published in the collection Kultura Obrazonych, but by 2003 Filipiak lost all her press assignments. She connects this turn of events with the mobilization of the Christian right as Poland entered the European Union.[5]

In 2003 Filipiak left for the

Gdańsk University.[7]

Since 2010, Filipiak has been the president of Writers for Peace Foundation whose goals are supporting minority voices and maintaining a network of artists concerned with issues of marginalized groups. In the fall of 2010, Writers for Peace confronted SKM, the local commuter train, regarding the lack of accessibility.[8]

Filipiak specializes in the subject of exclusion, displacement, grief (and the lack of formulas for its public expression for gay people), documenting styles of radical resistance to social and cultural exclusion, irony and black humor, debt, war and privatization.[9]

Works Published

References

  1. ^ Celia Hawkesworth, A History of Central European Women's Writing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 236.
  2. ^ Maria Janion, Kobiety i duch inności (Warsaw: Sic!, 2006), 320–345.
  3. ^ Halina Stephan, Living in Translation: Polish Writers in America (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2003), 338.
  4. ^ Mary Ann Caws and Nicola Luckhurst, The Reception of Virginia Woolf in Europe (London, New York: Continuum, 2002), 143.
  5. ^ "Wyborcza.pl".
  6. ^ "BBRG - Past Scholars". Archived from the original on 20 August 2008. Retrieved 23 February 2009.
  7. ^ "Uniwersytet Gdański - University of Gdańsk | Uniwersytet Gdański - IN MARI VIA TUA".
  8. ^ "SKM tylko dla pełnosprawnych. Problem nie do rozwiązania?". 7 September 2010.
  9. ^ "Wyborcza.pl".

External links


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