Announcing institution:
Krakow Library, Department of Culture and National Heritage of the City Hall of Krakow
Subject of the competition:
We invite poets who dream of making their book debut to take part in the tenth edition of the 2023 Poetry Set Competition. The prize in the competition is the publication of a poetry volume selected by the jury, an author meeting and the promotion of the book during this year's NIGHT OF POETRY. Entries are open until 30 April 2023.
The idea behind the competition, initiated in 2014 by the Department of Culture and National Heritage of the City Hall of Krakow, is to promote poetry debuts by supporting authors at the threshold of their careers. Since 2021, the Competition's organiser has been the Krakow Library. The patron of the competition, starting with the second edition (2015), has been Anna Świrszczyńska (1909-1984), an outstanding Polish poet, author of, among other things, the famous tome Jestem baba (1972), who made a kind of revolution in Polish poetry, both in terms of language and content. In his book Jakiego to gościa mieliśmy (What a Guest We Had) devoted to the poet, Czesław Miłosz wrote that Anna Świrszczyńska was "ahead of her time" in many respects. As the daughter of a painter, she moved freely "among the signs of the entire cultural heritage". She wrote about everyday matters in a way "that no Polish poet dared". Already her early poems, "stylised, intertextual, as we say today, imitate, pretend to parody, play, i.e. use ways that became fashionable only at the end of the century" (quoted in Cz. Miłosz, Jakiegoż to gościa mieliśmy, Kraków 2012, pp. 46-47, 113). Anna Świrszczyńska's poems have stood the test of time.
For more information call (+48) 12 618 91 00 w. 138 or 797 303 001 between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. (Monday to Friday).
More information: