Stone upon Stone

Wieslaw Mysliwski (b.1932) won the Nike Award (the Polish equivalent of the Booker Prize) TWICE (!) for Widnokrag [Horizon] (1996) and Traktat o luskaniu fasoli [The Treatise for Shelling Beans] (2006)--forthcoming from Archipelago. In his novels and plays Mysliwski concentrates on life in the Polish countryside. His voice is utterly unique, at once colloquial and thoughtful, questioning and wise.

Bill Johnston is Director of the Polish Studies Center at Indiana University. His translations include Gustaw Herling's The Noonday Cemetery and Other Stories (New Directions, 2003), Jerzy Pilch's His Current Woman (Grove, 2002), and Stefan Zeromski's The Faithful River (Northwestern, 1999). In 1999 he received a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship for Translation. In 2008 he won the inaugural Found in Translation award for Tadeusz Rozewicz's new poems, to be presented yearly to the translator of the finest Polish-English literary translation of the year.