Małgorzata Lebda with Antonia Lloyd-Jones and Mira Rosenthal presented by Professor Paulina Kewes

Join award-winning Polish poet and novelist Małgorzata Lebda and her translators Antonia Lloyd-Jones and Mira Rosenthal, in conversation with Paulina Kewes, Professor of English Literature at Oxford University.

The discussion will focus on two works by Małgorzata Lebda recently published in English:
 
Her poetry collection, Mer de Glace, won Poland's top poetry award, the Szymborska Prize (2022), and has been translated by Mira Rosenthal for Fitzcarraldo Editions. Małgorzata Lebda is also an ultramarathon runner, and in 2021 she ran 1,047 km (651 miles) — the entire length of Poland’s longest river, the Vistula — from its source in the Beskid Mountains to its mouth at the Baltic Sea. She set out to run as a poet, not as an athlete, using the rhythms of her own body as a means of understanding and connecting with the rhythms of the river’s waters, now under threat of environmental ruin.​​ Mer de Glace is the culmination of her remarkable journey. As Olga Tokarczuk wrote of Mer de Glace: “Małgorzata Lebda’s poetry never ceases to amaze the reader. Even a chance encounter with it imperceptibly creates an everlasting connection. As eternal as the bond between the frozen sea and the forest."
 
Lebda's first novel, Voracious, was published last year by Linden Editions in translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Voracious follows a year in the life of a young woman caring for her dying grandmother in the company of her grandfather, her friend, and plants and animals – from flies to cats, ants to dogs. Meanwhile their village in the Beskid mountains, in southern Poland, which echoes with noises from the nearby slaughterhouse, is threatened by a landslide. Małgorzata Lebda guides us through the countryside, changing seasons, wildlife, illness, death, and love. Everything is at once fragile and full of life, animate and inanimate. According to Max Porter, Voracious is "an intensely beautiful and unusual book about care and interconnectedness, it has an inherent peace and musicality unlike anything I've read."
 

Małgorzata Lebda is a Polish poet and fiction writer. She grew up in a hamlet in the Beskid Mountains and now lives in a meadow house in the Suwałki Gap, on Poland’s northeastern border. She is the author of several poetry collections. Mer de Glace, her fifth collection, has now been followed by a new volume, Dunaj. Chyłe pola ("Danube: Slanting Fields"), which won the Kościelski Foundation Prize in 2025. Łakome (Voracious) was published in Poland in 2023, since when it has won numerous nominations and awards, and has been translated into numerous languages, including English, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Finnish, Danish, Ukrainian and Serbian. A film adaptation is due for release in 2027. She is currently working on her second novel.
 
 
Mira Rosenthal is an American poet and translator of Polish-language writers such as Tomasz Różycki, Małgorzata Lebda and Krystyna Dąbrowska. Her work has received the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and the Found in Translation Award, among other recognitions, and twice has been nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize as well as for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, the National Translation Award, and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. She is the author of Territorial, a Pitt Poetry Series selection, and The Local World, winner of the Wick Poetry Prize. Other honours include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, two Fulbright Fellowships, and residencies at Hedgebrook, MacDowell and the Jan Michalski Foundation.
 
Antonia Lloyd-Jones translates fiction, non-fiction, poetry and children’s books from Polish. Her translation of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by 2018 Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International prize. For ten years she was a mentor for the Emerging Translators’ Mentorship Programme, and is a former co-chair of the UK Translators Association. Her recent publications include The Penguin Book of Polish Short Stories, as compiler and co-translator.