The historic center of Krakow is a UNESCO World heritage site and the park known as the Planty Ring that encircles the center has many benches which have similar plaques with the names of different writers.
The plaques read
"Krakow
City of Literature
UNESCO" and adds the name
"Jersy Pilch".
Underneath:
"Discover literary Krakow on codes.krakowcityof literature.com" which can be accessed at (
visit link)
Wikipedia (
visit link) informs us:
"Jerzy Pilch ...born 10 August 1952 in Wisla, Poland) is a Polish writer and journalist. Critics have compared Pilch's style to Witold Gombrowicz, Milan Kundera, or Bohumil Hrabal.
Born and raised in the small town of Wisla in the Beskids in southern Poland, Pilch studied Polish philology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and became active in the city's underground literary scene in the late 1970s. He began making his name under the martial law in the 1980s, by writing and reading essays for the "spoken magazine" Na Glos ("Out loud"), a regular spoken-word event organised by the oppositional Klub Inteligencji Katolickiej ("Club of Polish Catholic Intellectuals") (even though Pilch himself is Lutheran).
In 1989 Pilch began to contribute highly popular satirical essays for the Kraków-based liberal Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, which established him as a public intellectual. Pilch's best essays from his column in Tygodnik Powszechny appeared in three collections entitled Rozpacz z powodu utraty furmanki ("Despair caused by the loss of a wagon", 1994), Tezy o glupocie, piciu i umieraniu ("Theses on stupidity, drinking and dying", 1995), and Bezpowrotnie utracona leworecznosc ("The irreversible loss of left-handedness", 1998).
Also in 1989, he was conferred the renowned Koscielski Award for his debut novel Wyznania twórcy pokatnej literatury erotycznej ("Confessions of an author of illicit erotic literature"), an ironic insider's account of the Kraków art scene.
Pilch's second novel, Spis cudzoloznic ("List of Adulteresses", 1993), tells the story of a failed eccentric writer guiding a foreign guest on a tour of Kraków and through a curio collection of national myths and the absurd socialist realities of the 1980s. In 1995, actor Jerzy Stuhr made the novel into a film as his directing debut (under the international title List of Lovers).
The same year, Pilch published his third novel Inne rozkoszy ("Other pleasures"), the first to appear in English (as His Current Woman, 2002) (see external links).
Pilch quit his work for Tygodnik Powszechny in 1999, left the Kraków scene entirely, and settled down in Warsaw, where he began to write a column for the weekly Polityka. A collection of texts from this series was published as Upadek czlowieka pod Dworcem Centralnym ("The Fall of Man in front of the Central Station") in 2002.
Pilch's most successful book so far is his fourth novel Pod Mocnym Aniolem ("The Strong Angel Inn", 2000), a satirical take on the "drinking novel" genre, which was awarded a NIKE, the prestigious Polish literary award, the following year. In 2009, it was translated into English as The Mighty Angel, and in 2010, Tysiac spokojnych miast was also translated as A Thousand Peaceful Cities."